Tony Poshepny - "Tony Poe" as he was called-was a paramilitary expert. A former Marine who fought in the Pacific in World War II, Tony Poe ran secret armies for the CIA. In 1956 he trained Khamba tribesmen in Tibet for guerrilla warfare against the Chinese communists; he was one of the CIA's paramilitary advisers to the failed colonels' revolt in Indonesia, and he would go on to become a kind of warlord with the Hmong tribesmen in Laos. Faintly resembling Marlon Brando in middle age, he was sometimes said to be the real-life version of the mad Colonel Kurtz of Apocalypse Now, but even after he went native in Laos and began consuming a bottle of local white lightning every day, he was a very effective fighter. He was fearless; he seemed at home with violence (on R&R, he always carried a boxer's mouthpiece in case he got into a bar fight). Wounded several times, Poe had a claw for a hand, maimed by a jungle booby trap. He had some odd habits: for a time, he paid Laotian irregulars to bring back the ears of their enemy dead-a dollar per ear. Once, when headquarters questioned a body count, he mailed in a fresh batch of bloody ears. He desisted in the custom when he ran into a Laotian boy who was missing his ears. The boy explained that his father had chopped off his ears to sell to the Americans."

Shackley's tribal troops and most U.S. programs in Laos depended on two highly unorthodox civilian air transport firms, Air America and Continental Air Services. Officially, Air America was a private company, but it was an open secret that Air America was a CIA front, owned entirely by the Agency. As its number one "customer" in Laos, Shackley de facto supervised much of its operations. Its pilots flew in and out of combat zones, hauling tribal and Lao troops, the wounded, unidentified CIA officers, VIPs, weapons, ammunition, and livestock. Continental Air was not owned by the Agency, hut the firm argued it was improper for Air America to win all the available contracts. The threat was implicit: either the Agency hire Continental, or Air America's cover would be blown.

Ed Dearborn, the director of operations of Continental and a former Agency hand, disliked dealing with Shackley. Dearborn, who had been in charge of the Agency's secret air war in the Congo, was accustomed to camaraderie existing between the CIA officers on the ground and the covert airmen. But Shackley was all business. Dearborn's meetings with Shackley in the chiefs nondescript embassy office were like corporate sessions, the only concern being the bottom line. "Shackley would ask us to go where people shouldn't go," Dearborn recalled. "He asked us to do things that we were not able to do with the type of equipment we had. We were just pilots, not fighter pilots. But he had his requirements and didn't care how it was done. Shackley's attitude was, `Do this, and I don't care if you get back.' "

In Laos, Shackley was to command present and future Agency legends. The most notorious was Tony Poe. A large, rough-looking fellow with a booming voice, Poe had helped create Vang Pao's army. As more Americans settled into Long Tieng in the 1960s, he pushed further into the remote reaches of Laos to run operations out of the northwest corner. There "Mr. Tony" directed tribal units and became the subject of many bizarre and mostly true tales. He had aided Burmese insurgents, when Washington officially was favoring the government of Burma. He kept heads of slain enemy soldiers in jars of formaldehyde. And Tony Poe, according to a case officer who served with him, used to collect ears.

Poe had offered his tribal irregulars a bounty for enemy ears-a dollar a pair. When mission officials once questioned Poe about his claims of a large enemy body count, he stapled a batch of fresh and bloody ears to a report and sent it to the station. Eventually, he discontinued this program when he discovered it provided too much encouragement. At one airstrip, he had found a small boy with no ears. "My father took them to get money from the Americans," the boy said.

Poe, who married a Yau princess and spoke several local dialects, embodied the term "gone native." Within the DDP, he was well known and admired, even if grudgingly. But one case officer who worked with Poe in Laos considered him a tragic figure, a sad symbol of U.S. policy: "an interesting man who was very confused, very sick, and very good, extremely good, working with local people, enormously brave. He loved what he did. He simply lost touch with reality."

In 1963 Poe was sent to Laos as chief adviser to General Vang Pao.87 Several years later he was transferred to northwestern Laos to supervise Secret Army operations in the tri-border area and work with Yao tribesmen. The Yao remembered "Mr. Tony" as a drinker, an authoritarian commander who bribed and threatened to get his way, and a mercurial leader who offered his soldiers 500 kip (one dollar) for an ear and 5,000 kip for a severed head when accompanied by a Pathet Lao army cap.88 His attitude toward the opium traffic was erratic. According to a former Laos USAID official, Poe refused to allow opium on his aircraft and once threatened to throw a Lao soldier, with half a kilo of opium, out of an airborne plane. At the same time, he ignored the prospering heroin factories along the Mekong River and never stopped any of Ouane Rattikone's officers from using U.S.-supplied facilities to manage the drug traffic.

Some say Tony Poe was the model for the Col Kurtz character of the film 'Apocalypse Now'. He inspired fear and disgust.

Anthony A. Poshepny, a decorated, former CIA official who collected enemy ears, dropped decapitated human heads from the air on to communists and stuck heads on spikes, was buried on Saturday in California after waging failed secret wars in Indonesia, Tibet and Laos.

"The posting of decapitated heads obviously sent a powerful message, especially to North Vietnamese troops seeking to invade the homelands of the Hmong and Lao people,'' said Philip Smith, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Public Policy Analysis, in an email interview after Poshepny's death on June 27.

"He successfully fought terror with terror. He strove to instill courage and respect in the tribal and indigenous forces that he recruited and trained as well as fear in the enemy.

"In the post-Sept 11th, 2001, security environment, fearless men like Tony 'Poe' are what America needs to combat and counter terrorism and the new unconventional threat that America faces from abroad in exotic and uncharted lands,'' Mr Smith said....

The loquacious, gravel-voiced Poshepny confirmed to me in 2001 that he rewarded his fighters for bringing in enemy ears. He also confirmed he let his Lao guerrillas erect a human head on a spike and toss pebbles at it, to boost their anti-communist fervor.

Poshepny said he twice hurled human heads from an aircraft on to his enemies in Laos, to terrify them. "We flew in real low, in front of that bastard's house and I threw the head so it bounced right on his porch and into his front door,'' Poshepny, laughing, told me at his San Francisco home in 2001.

Based for several years in the highlands of northern Laos, where he was seriously wounded three times, Poshepny grew angry at Washington's attempts to control his activities. So he sent a bag filled with human ears to the US embassy in the Lao capital, Vientiane, to prove his guerrillas were killing communists.

The unopened bag arrived on a Friday and sat in the US embassy over the weekend. "Human ears contain a lot of water, and they dried up and shriveled in the heat all weekend, so when the embassy secretary opened the bag on Monday morning it was terrible and she got real sick,'' Poshepny told me. "I really regret doing that to her because she wasn't to blame at all.''

He unabashedly admitted his horrific acts to other journalists, while insisting his motive was to defeat communism. "I used to collect ears,'' a cheerful Poshepny was quoted as telling Roger Warner in his book, Shooting at the Moon, which won Washington's Overseas Press Club award for the best book on foreign affairs.

"I had a big, green, reinforced cellophane bag as you walked up my steps. I'd tell my people to put them in, and then I'd staple them to this 5,000 kip (Lao currency) notice that this ear was paid for already, and put them in the bag and send them to Vientiane with the report.

"Sent them only once or twice, and then the goddamn office girls [in the US embassy] were sick for a week. Putrid when they opened up the envelope. Some guy in the office, he told me, 'Jeez, don't ever do that again. These goddamn women don't know anything about this shit, and they throw up all over the place.'