The administration’s most pressing problem was in Laos, the narrow, strategically located nation that the French had carved out in 1956 as its autonomous protectorate. It was a vital highway along which their allies in North Vietnam covertly moved into South Vietnam to supplement indigenous rebels or to implant their own guerilla forces. In April 1961, with the homegrown South Vietnamese resistance enervated by heavy losses the previous spring, traffic along the so-called “Ho Chi Minh trail” picked up precipitously. The assistance from Lao’s Communists, the Pathet Lao, enabled the Viet Minh to conduct an extraordinary reinforcing maneuver that threatened to topple the government in Saigon. Kefauver and Kennedy reacted by sending air power and the U.S Marines into areas bordering Laos. Simultaneously, the CIA redoubled its assistance to the right-wing rebels under Colonel Phoumi Nosavan, an anti-French rebel who succeeded in rallying a well-supplied resistance against the syndicalist government.