The Thai Silk King Who Walked Into the Jungle and Never Came Back

2026-06-17 · Vanished Without a Trace · 8 min read

On the afternoon of Easter Sunday, 26 March 1967, James Harrison Wilson Thompson set down his coffee at a bungalow in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia and stepped outside for a walk. He was sixty-one years old, lean and restless, and he was the most famous American in Southeast Asia. He left his cigarettes on the table, and Thompson smoked constantly. He left behind the pills he carried for the gallstone attacks that could double him over without warning. He was never seen again.

Thompson was born in Delaware in 1906 and trained as an architect. In the Second World War he served with the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA, recruited into that world by its founder, General William Donovan. He ran missions in North Africa and Europe, and as the war closed he was posted to Ceylon and attached to the Free Thai underground, the network resisting the Japanese occupation of Thailand. Through it he came to know Pridi Banomyong, the liberal regent and later prime minister who had secretly led that resistance. It was a friendship that would weigh on much of what was later written about him.

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