Lucien Conein was born
in Paris in 1919. Five years later his widowed mother arranged for
him to live with her sister in Kansas City, who had married a soldier
in the United States Army (he had served
in France during the First
World War).
When the Second
World War broke out in 1939 Conein returned to France and joined
the French Army. After the German invasion
in 1940 Conein returned to the United States.
He now joined the U.S. Army but because of his knowledge of France
he was transferred to the Office of Strategic
Services (OSS).
In 1944 he was sent to
Vichy France with orders to help the French
Resistance attack the German Army
during the Allied landings in Normandy.
He worked with the Jedburghs, a multinational band directed by the
Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the
British Special Operations Executive (SOE).
While in France
Conein working with
the Corsican Brotherhood, an underworld organization allied with the
resistance. Later Conein was to say: ""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 the death of Adolf
Hitler and the surrender of Germany
in April, 1945, Conein was sent to Vietnam
where he helped organize attacks against the Japanese
Army.
Lucien Conein in 1945
At the end of the Second
World War Conein returned to Europe as a member of the OSS. This
included organizing the infiltration of spies and saboteurs into those
countries in Eastern Europe under the control of the Soviet
Union. Conein
later joined the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA)
and was involved in covert
operations in several different countries.
In 1951, Gordon Stewart,
the CIA chief of espionage in West Germany,
sent Conein to establish a base in Nuremberg. The following year Ted
Shackley arrived
to help Conein with his work. The main purpose of this base was to
send agents into Warsaw Pact countries
to gather information needed to fight the Soviet
Union during the Cold War. The venture
was not a great success and the governments in both Poland
and Czechoslovakia announced that they
had smashed several CIA espionage rings. Later he worked with William
Harvey
in Berlin.
In 1954 Conein was sent
to work under General Edward Lansdale
in a covert operation against the government of Ho
Chi Minh in North
Vietnam. The plan was to mount a propaganda campaign to persuade
the Vietnamese people in the south not to vote for the communists
in the forthcoming elections. In the months that followed they distributed
targeted documents that claimed the Vietminh
had entered South Vietnam
and were killing innocent civilians. The Ho
Chi Minh
government was also accused
of slaying thousands of political opponents in North Vietnam.
In the late 1950s Conein
worked closely with William Colby, the CIA
station chief in Saigon. Conein helped to arm and train local tribesmen,
mostly the Montagnards, who carried out attacks on the Vietminh.
These men also guided Vietnamese Special Forces units who made commando
raids into Laos and North
Vietnam.
President John
F. Kennedy eventually
became convinced that President
Ngo
Dinh Diem would
never be able to unite the South Vietnamese against communism. Several
attempts had already been made to overthrow Diem but Kennedy had always
instructed the CIA and the US military forces
in Vietnam to protect him. In order to
obtain a more popular leader of South Vietnam, Kennedy agreed that
the role of the CIA should change. Conein provided a group of South
Vietnamese generals with $40,000 to carry out the coup with the promise
that US forces would make no attempt to protect Diem. At the beginning
of November, 1963, Diem was overthrown by a military coup. After the
generals had promised Diem that he would be allowed to leave the country
they changed their mind and killed him. Nguyen
Van Thieu now became the chairman of a 10-member military directorate.
It has been suggested that
Conein might have been involved in the assassination of John
F. Kennedy. In
his book, The Last Investigation,
Gaeton
Fonzi
points out that Conein was
closely connected to E.
Howard Hunt and
Mitchell WerBell,
two men suspected of the crime. Joseph
Trento has also pointed out that Conein worked with Ted
Shackley and
William
Harvey at
the JM/WAVE CIA station in Miami in 1963.
Leroy
Fletcher Prouty claimed
that Conein has been identified as being in Dallas on the day of the
assassination. Whereas Ron
Ecker
and Jack
White
have suggested
that he was standing at the corner of Main and Houston at the time
Kennedy was killed. However, Larry
Hancock has
investigated Conein and believes he never left Vietnam during 1963.
Conein left the CIA
in 1968 and became a businessman in South
Vietnam. In 1970 E.
Howard Hunt introduced
Conein to President Richard Nixon. Two
years later Nixon appointed Conein to the Drug Enforcement Administration,
where he directed an intelligence-gathering and operations unit. It
has been claimed by William
Turner and Warren
Hinckle (Deadly
Secrets) that this work included "plots to assassinate
key international drug figures".
In 1972 E.
Howard Hunt considered
hiring Conein for the group that bungled the 1972 Watergate
burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Conein
later told the historian, Stanley Karnow: "If I'd been involved,
we'd have done it right."
Lucien Conein died after
a heart attack at Suburban Hospital, Virginia, on 3rd June, 1998.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(1)
David
Corn, Blond Ghost: The Shackley
and the CIA's Crusades (1994)
Shackley embraced
his position as an intelligence officer with passion. He compensated
for his lack of experience with diligence. Conein often found Shackley
at his desk late in the evening. For the most part, the two went their
separate ways. Conein was a hell-raiser. Shackley was calm and cool,
a detailist, who plotted the most minute specifics of an operation.
The pair shared an occasional drink at the officers' club and lunched
together maybe once a month, but they did not collaborate. The guiding
principle was need-to-know, a sacred rule of secret services. There
was no reason for these two officers to be aware of the other's activity.
(2)
Seymour
Hersh,
The Dark
Side of Camelot (1997)
By the end of October, it was clear that Diem had no intention of
turning away from his brother. He would stay in Saigon and so would
Nhu. Shortly before the coup, Lodge offered Diem safe conduct by airplane
to a neutral country, but the proud Diem rejected the offer as apparently
was expected. There is no evidence that Lodge or any embassy official
made a serious effort to save Diem. No American, for example, urged
General Minh and his fellow plotters to spare Diem's life. In his
1975 testimony to the Church Committee, Lucien Conein claimed that
at about six o'clock on the morning of the coup he was asked by General
Minh to procure an aircraft to evacuate Diem. He checked with the
CIA station in Saigon, Conein said, and was told that it would be
impossible to get a plane to Saigon within twenty-four hours. The
aircraft had to be capable of flying Diem to a suitable neutral country
without being forced to land for refueling - no one in the Kennedy
administration wanted Diem to hold a planeside news conference. The
only plane available, Conein said he was told, would have to be flown
from Guam. By eight o'clock that morning, as Conein surely knew, Diem
was in the hands of the military men who would murder him. In any
case, a suitable aircraft could easily have been provided in advance
but was not. Jack Kennedy had written off Diem, and everyone in Saigon
knew it.
(3)
Gaeton
Fonzi,
The Last Investigation (1993)
Then there was WerBell's buddy Lucien Conein, whom he had known in
his OSS days. "You've got to start with the premise that Lou
Conein is crazy," said one of his former CIA bosses once. Crazy
enough to always survive. A beefy, scarred, gnarled old grizzly of
a man, Conein left Kansas City when he was seventeen to join the French
Foreign Legion. In 1941 in France, he switched to the OSS and lived
and fought with the notorious Corsican Brotherhood, which was then
part of the Resistance. (Later, the Brotherhood became deeply involved
in the drug trade and was considered much more effective and dangerous
than its Sicilian counterpart, the Mafia.) Moving on to the Far East,
Conein was part of an OSS team parachuted into Vietnam to fight the
Japanese alongside the Vietminh. He then fought against the Vietminh
with the "Blackhawk" operation, helped Ngo Dinh Diem consolidate
his power in South Vietnam and then, in a policy turnaround, was the
CIA's liaison with the cabal of generals who murdered Diem.
It was Conein's involvement
with this last coup which led another old OSS cohort, E. Howard Hunt,
to give him a call several years later. Hunt, by then, was working
in the Nixon White House. Besides wanting Conein to release a group
of phony telegrams which would have squarely blamed President Kennedy
for the Diem assassination (Nixon then considered Edward Kennedy his
prime political foe), he wanted Conein to run what was, ostensibly,
the White House war against the international drug trade.
Conein got involved in
a series of sensitive operations with Hunt, some of which, according
to a later report in the Washington Post, "appear to have stretched
so far over the boundaries of legality that they were undertaken in
total secrecy." One of these, part of a program called "Gemstone,"
was "Operation Diamond," a large, secret organization which
Bernard Barker was putting together for Hunt in Miami. Barker reportedly
recruited some 200 former CIA Cuban agents and organized them into
specialized groups for future operations. Among these were intelligence
and counterintelligence units known as "Action Teams," the
old CIA term for units with paramilitary skills, including assassination.
Then, in November, 1973,
Conein got moved out of the White House-though not out from under
White House command-to become chief of Special Operations for the
Drug Enforcement Administration. He was to be part of Nixon's highly
publicized nationwide police campaign, led by White House enforcers
with special powers, to combat drug abuse.
It has been suggested that Nixon's antidrug campaign was, in actuality,
a bid to establish his own intelligence network.
(4)
Alan
J. Weberman,
Coup D'Etat in America:
The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (1975)
Kennedy dug his own grave by trying to stop the Howard Hunts of the
CIA from killing Castro. As Frank Sturgis put it "... Howard
tried to assassinate Castro, and Castro is still around, bigger than
ever. Alright, but hey, listen, Howard was in charge of other CIA
operations that involved 'disposal' and I can tell you, some of them
worked."
One gains insight into
Hunt's feelings about Kennedy by looking at his activities exposed
as a result of Watergate. There is Howard Hunt, a CIA agent who also
wrote books. One of these books is a blatant anti-Kennedy allegory.
When John Dean opened Howard Hunt's safe he found bogus telegrams
linking Kennedy with the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem. Hunt had
shown General Charles Conein copies of these forged telegrams because
the General had served under Kennedy in Vietnam in 1963. After speaking
with Hunt, Conein began to shift the blame for Diem's assassination
to Kennedy. Soon after, Conein got a job in the Drug Enforcement Administration.
While he was with the DEA, Conein was in contact with a private company
that produced sophisticated assassination weapons. The New York Times
printed part of a memo written on the letterhead of this company which
read, "Enclosed is a catalogue which was put together only after
we started working with Lou Conein." There is no evidence that
Conein helped forge the telegrams.
Hunt's safe also contained material relating to an investigation of
Chappaquidick. He cultivated informers within the Kennedy clan"
and may have forged documents blaming the failure of the Bay of Pigs
invasion on a secret agreement between Kennedy and Castro.
Available from
Amazon Books (order below)
