In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States ran its largest clandestine operation to date in Laos, where a guerrilla army of Hmong fighters confronted the North Vietnamese-backed Pathet Lao. The war next door in Vietnam filled newspaper pages and television screens; this one did not. Journalists who came asking questions were turned back at gunpoint. John Willheim, a newly commissioned CIA officer and an accomplished photographer, was sent in to document what he saw without restriction. His photographs and films were classified at the time and seen by only a handful of senior officials and President Lyndon Johnson. They stayed out of view for decades.

War of Whispers gathers that material into a 280-page hardcover, designed by the Dutch bookmaker -SYB-, whose sequencing gives the project its almost cinematic shape. The photographs attend to people, villages, and landscapes behind the battle lines, and their ordinary textures sit hard against the fact of the fighting. Willheim’s loyalties are legible throughout: his sympathy lies with the Hmong who fought a proxy war for the United States and lost it, and who after 1975 faced persecution at home or exile abroad. Accompanying the images are Willheim’s own texts, a poem by Bryan Thao Worra, lyrics from a Leonard Cohen song, and an afterword by General Stanley McChrystal. The result is not a soldier’s album but a documentary record assembled with care.

For readers of photobooks about conflict and its aftermath, the book matters on several counts. It is, by the publisher’s account, the only photobook published on the Secret War, and the photographs carry the authority of having been made inside the operation by one of its own officers. The design by -SYB- treats archive material as a narrative problem rather than a trove, and the combination of image and text positions the work as historical testimony rather than celebration. Fifty years on, the book makes a hidden episode available to a general readership, and it does so in a form that rewards slow attention.