Lucien Conein

Lt. Col. Lucien Emile Conein (29 November 1919 – 3 June 1998) was a French-American citizen, noted U.S. Army officer and OSS/CIA operative.

Lucien Conein was born in Paris, France at the end of World War One. When he was five years old, his widowed mother sent him to Kansas City to live with his aunt, who had married a US soldier. Sources are in conflict as to whether Lucien was a member of the French Foreign Legion. According to one source he was seventeen when he joined the foreign legion. Another source claims he was never an official member despite being a regular at annual French Foreign Legion dinners in Washington. In 1939, the beginning of World War Two, the 20 year old joined the French Army. He switched to the U.S. Army within a year because of the German invasion establishing Vichy France, and as a native speaker of French he was quickly transferred to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

In 1944 he was ordered to help the French Resistance during the Allied landings in Normandy. He worked with the Jedburghs, a group directed by the OSS and the British Special Operations Executive.

It was then that Conein began working and living with the Corsican mafia, then called Corsican Brotherhood, an ally of the Resistance. He was quoted:

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.'

He was briefly sent to Vietnam to help organize attacks against the Japanese Army. Conein was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for operations conducted during this period.

After 1945 during the Cold War period, he infiltrated spies and saboteurs into the Eastern European Warsaw pact countries of the Soviet block.In 1951, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) tasked Conein to establish a base in Nuremberg, assisted by Ted Shackley in 1952. Later he worked with William King Harvey in Berlin.

In 1954, he was sent to work against the government of Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam, at first in a propaganda campaign to persuade Southern Vietnamese not to vote for the communists then to help with arming and training local tribesmen, called the Montagnards working under CIA station chief William Colby.

During the November 1963 coup against Ngô Đình Diệm which resulted in Diệm's assassination, he served as Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.'s liaison officer with the coup plotters and delivered $42,000 of the known cash disbursements.

In 1968, Conein left the CIA and became a businessman in South Vietnam.

In 1972, Nixon appointed him as chief of covert operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

He was considered by former CIA colleague E. Howard Hunt for the group that undertook the 1972 Watergate burglary of the Democratic National Committee. Conein told Stanley Karnow, "If I’d been involved, we’d have done it right."

Conein retired in 1984.

Conein married Elyette B. Conein in 1957. They had three children. In June 1998, he died of a heart attack at the age of 79 in Suburban Hospital, Bethesda, Maryland. He was survived by six sons, one daughter, 11 grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.