Lucien Conein

Template:TOC-right Lucein E. Conein (1919-1998) was a U.S. clandestine operations officer working both for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Anong his many assignments, he was the direct U.S. contact to the 1963 coup against Ngo Dinh Diem.

He was a colorful character and a legend in special operations, often prefacing his stories with ""Now, this one is the double truth, scout's honor, the double truth," or "Don't believe anything I tell you; I'm an expert liar."

Early life

He was born in Paris, but brought up in Kansas City, sent there, alone, at the age of 5 by his widowed mother. He would grow up in Missouri with his aunt, a First World War French bride of an American soldier. Retaining his French citizenship, when the Second World War broke out, he went to the French Consulate in Chicago, and enlisted in 1939.

After the fall of France, he joined the U.S. Army, where his language skills took him into the OSS. While growing up in Missouri, he retained his French citizenship, and when World War II began in 1939, he went to the French consulate in Chicago and joined the French Army.

After the fall of France to Germany in 1940, he made his way back to the United States, joined the U.S. Army and, because of his fluency in French, was assigned to OSS. As a member of Operation Jedburgh, which had missions similar to the guerilla role of United States Army Special Forces, he landed behind German lines in Southern France, in 1944. His resistance forces prepared the battlefield for attaks on retreating German forces.

While in France, he was made an honorary member of the Corsican Brotherhood. "When the Sicilians put out a contract, it's usually limited to the continental United States, or maybe Canada or Mexico. But with the Corsicans, it's international. They'll go anywhere. There's an old Corsican proverb: 'If you want revenge and you act within 20 years, you're acting in haste.'" With Conein, it might have been true; one never truly knew.

OSS Indochina

In the 1945 OSS missions to China and North Vietnam, he had been assigned, as an expert guerilla, fluent in French, and not in sympathy with French colonial policy, both to gather intelligence on French and Japanese positions, and to carry out sabotage in a program called COMORE. Edward Lansdale said "he'd gotten in with some of the French and some of the Vietnamese who were anti-communist in those days . So he was a guy with the long-term memory of things and he was very close to the Foreign Legion and very close to some of the Vietnamese. Since the French Foreign Legion is literally that, he could not have been an actual Legionnaire, since he joined the French Army while a French citizen. While, in theory, he could have joined the Legion once he became a U.S. citizen, his service history is too well known to have allowed for that. What does make sense is that he became well-known to Legion personnel either in the late forties, or when he started stay-behind networks in 1954. The Legion, which lost a large number of its troops at Dien Bien Phu, was very active in the war against the Viet Minh.

1954 Saigon Military Mission

Conein, reporting to Lansdale in the Saigon Military Mission, arrived on July 1, 1945. In August, he went to Hanoi with the assignment of developing a paramilitary organization in the north.

1963 Coup

On July 9, 1963, when John McCone, Director of Central Intelligence briefed Kennedy on a coup being contemplated by the commander of the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam, Tran Van Don, who had discussed it with Conein. Don was repported to have said the generals felt they had to act before the Viet Cong made more propaganda from the Buddhist persecution; Don said that Buddhist leaders did not believe Diem would keep his agreements made in June, and Buddhists were planning more suicides and demonstrations.

In October, Conein "accidentally" met General Don, who tells him that a coup is nearly ready; the corps commander for the Saigon area had not yet committed. They scheduled another meeting for the 5th, at which, with Henry Cabot Lodge approval, Conein met with Gen. Duong Van Minh, the potential coup leader. Minh mentioned three possible plans; one involved assassination. When Conein reported back to Lodge, Lodge asked Washington that Conein "be authorized to say that the U.S. will not thwart a coup, that we are willing to review plans, and that we will continue support to a successor regime."

Post-Vietnam

After retiring from the Army and CIA in 1968, he went back to South Vietnam as a businessman. In 1972, he joined the Drug Enforcement Administration to head their special operations, and was investigated by a committee under Senator Lowell Weicker, exploring but coming to no conclusions about DEA planning assassinations against drug traffickers. DEA involvement, however, was very edgy to the Corsican Brotherhood.

He told historian Stanley Karnow that he declined an offer E. Howard Hunt had considered hiring him for the Watergate burglary, but observed, "If I'd been involved, we'd have done it right." Hunt testified to the Senate that he knew Conein. Karnow spent 70 hours interviewing Conein for a potential biography, but gave up on the project when Karnow concluded that it was too hard for Conein to separate his cover stories from reality. Karnow said "He was the swashbuckling soldier of fortune -- the guy who has ceased to exist except in fiction. A marvelous storyteller. Whether the stories were true or not was beside the point. They were almost always almost entirely true."For example, it was rumored that he lost several fingers on a dangerous secret mission, possibly with the Legion. He had lost them when fixing the engine of the car in which he was taking the wife of his best friend to a tryst, so the mission was arguably secret and dangerous.