Lucien Conein
- 3 min read
- 4 chapters
Related on Lably
Through Paris, World War I and World War II
Early life
Lucien Conein was born to Lucien Xavier Conein and Estelle Elin in Paris, France at the end of World War I. 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. Conein attended Wyandotte High School in Kansas City, Kansas, dropping out after his junior year.
In 1939, the beginning of World War II, the 20-year-old joined the French Army but switched to the U.S. Army within a year because of the German invasion establishing Vichy France. As a native speaker of French he was asked to volunteer for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). According to biographer William J. Rust, Conein was reported to have had a "flair for exaggeration" and his service in the French Army "was sometimes portrayed as a more romantic-sounding assignment in the French Foreign Legion".
Sign in to keep reading
3 more chapters are free with a Lably account.
Military career
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 French Indochina to help organize attacks against the Imperial Japanese Army and 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 bloc. In 1951, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) tasked Conein to establish a base in Nuremberg, assisted by Ted Shackley. Later Conein 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 and then to help with arming and training local tribesmen, called the Montagnards working under CIA station chief William Colby. Conein was an intelligence agent in Vietnam in 1961 and 1962. Allen Ginsberg described him as "the crucial person" in the CIA's link with the Southeast Asian opium trade. 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 cash disbursements.
In 1968, Conein left the CIA and became a businessman in South Vietnam. In 1972, President Nixon appointed Conein 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 from the DEA in 1984.
Personal life
Conein married Elyette B. Conein in 1957. They had three children. At the time of his death, he was survived by six sons, one daughter, 11 grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.
Death
Conein died of a heart attack, aged 78, at Suburban Hospital, Bethesda, Maryland in June 1998.