Lucien Emile "Lou" Conein (29 November 1919 – 3 June 1998) was a French-American citizen, noted U.S. Army officer and OSS/CIA operative. Conein is best known for his instrumental role in the November 1963 coup against Ngô Đình Diệm and Diệm's assassination by serving as Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.'s liaison officer with the coup plotters and delivering $42,000 of the known cash disbursements. 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". 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 Vietnam to help organize attacks against the 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 block. 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,