Word: bangkok
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...primary purpose was to supply kip to pay and support the army. But in the two years since then, as the U.S. steadily broadened its aid program, the free rate has soared as high as 120 kip for $1 in the markets of Vientiane, Bangkok and Hong Kong. The disparity between official and free-exchange rates has become an open invitation to speculators. The system works this way: a Laotian importer wants to bring in 20 radios at a unit cost of $50 each. He gets an import license for $1,000 worth of radios from the Laotian government...
What was immediate and sure was the beeper's psychological impact. In many quarters U.S. discomfiture was greeted with open glee. RUSSIANS RIP AMERICAN FACE, headlined Bangkok's Sathiraphab, and in Beirut a university professor said wryly of his Arab students: "You would have thought they launched it themselves." But nowhere was the beeper's impact so ominous as in the neutral nations of Afro-Asia, where hundreds of millions of uncommitted minds waver between East and West. Its message, said the London Economist last week, was a simple one: "We Russians, a backward people ourselves less...
...police chief the week before, to surrender himself. Phao heard the order at home, went first to a nearby Chinese bar for two quick bracers, then to Sarit's headquarters. Along the way, Phao unbuckled his police automatic and chucked it into the viscid, green waters of a Bangkok canal. Sarit gave him two choices: leave the country or become a Buddhist monk. Phao chose to leave for Switzerland, where he can count his money. He had not been exiled, said a Foreign Ministry official and, in fact, would go to work in the Thai legation in Geneva...
Kept in Kep. As Sarit's troops were moving into position to take over Bangkok, the army radio broadcast frantic appeals for Pibul to surrender. "Please report, please report as soon as possible," said the military announcers. But Pibul, accompanied only by a military aide, was already speeding south at the wheel of his Thunderbird. Somewhere along the coast of the Gulf of Siam, Pibul and his aide boarded a navy LCM manned by his personal guards. Three days later Pibul and a skeleton personal staff disembarked some 200 miles away at the Cambodian seaside resort...
...Western foreign policy. As an earnest of his intentions, Sarit saw to it that able, pro-Western Pote Sarasin, a 52-year-old aristocrat who served for five years as Ambassador to Washington, was named temporary Premier. Meanwhile, a scheduled meeting of the SEATO military group convened in Bangkok without a hitch. Said Sarit: "Only the hosts have changed...