Lucien Conein

During that early intelligence, um, CIA period was doing some comparable, uh, stuff.

Yeah, and he worked with a, a guy named, uh, Lou Conein.

Oh, yeah.

Lou Conein-

Uh, Mac Luigi.

Fascinating.

Uh-

Yeah

Simultaneously, [clears throat] public opposition to Diem's dictatorship erupted in the Buddhist crisis of nineteen sixty-three, exemplified by the self-immolation of the Venerable Quang Duc in June of, of that year.

As Washington's doubts about Diem grew in the midst of this crisis, our US Ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, began working with the CIA's new man on the spot in Saigon, CIA agent Lucien Conein, working through him to organize a coup.

[clears throat] Born in France and raised in Kansas City, CIA operative Lucien Conein had fought in France and Vietnam during World War II as an agent of the Office of Strategic Services.

That was the precursor to the CIA.

And You always look for the guy hiding in the back row, and there's Lucien Conein right back there.

And this is the OSS team in the hour of victory in September of nineteen forty-five when they had just won World War II and defeated the Japanese.

[clears throat] Assigned to the CIA Saigon station in nineteen sixty-two, Conein's uque- unique bicultural fluency allowed him an extraordinary autonomy in Saigon's covert netherworld, consorting with the city's Corsican gangsters and cultivating friends among the South Vietnamese generals, like General Tran Van Don.

So what are you gonna do?" Well, what they did was inge- instead of sending him to the airport to board an aircraft, they sent him to the...

He opposed the coup primarily because he thought that there was no suitable alternative for Diem as leader of South Vietnam.

And at the same time, there is this CIA officer, Lieutenant Colonel Lucien Conein, who ends up becoming a middleman between the US Ambassador to Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr, who disagrees with McCone and wants Diem to go, and Vietnamese generals who agree with Lodge.

Can you tell us about Conein? Why was he the go-between, and what role was he playing?

Well, Conein's a very interesting character.

The generals really trusted Conein, and they generally didn't trust other Americans at the time.

They had known Conein for a long time.

Conein had come to South Vietnam in, in the mid-1950s as part of the, uh, what was called the Saigon Military Mission under the famous Edward Lansdale, another CIA operative.

So in a way, Conein had kinda grown up with some of these military officers in South Vietnam.