Anthony Poshepny Anthony Alexander Poshepny ( September 18 , 1924 – June 27 , 2003 ) , known as Tony Poe , was a CIA paramilitary officer in what is now called Special Activities Division . He is best remembered for training the United States Secret Army in Laos during the Vietnam War . Early life and career . Accurate accounting of Poshepny ' s career is complicated by government secrecy and by his tendency to embellish stories . For example , he often claimed to be a refugee from Hungary , but was actually born in Long Beach , California . He joined the US Marine Corps in 1942 serving in the 2nd Marine Parachute Battalion and fought in the 5th Marine Division on Iwo Jima , receiving two Purple Heart s . After graduating from San Jose State University in 1950 , he joined the CIA and worked in Korea during the Korean War , training refugees for sabotage missions behind enemy lines . After the Korean war , Poshepny joined the Bangkok - based CIA front company Overseas Southeast Asia Supply ( SEA Supply ) , which provided military equipment to Kuomintang forces based in Burma . In 1958 , Poshepny tried unsuccessfully to arrange a military uprising against Sukarno , the president of Indonesia . From 1958 to 1960 , he trained various special missions teams , including Tibetan Khamba s and Hui Muslims at Camp Hale , for operations in China against the Communist government . Poshepny sometimes claimed that he personally escorted the 14th Dalai Lama out of Tibet , but this has been denied , both by former CIA officers involved in the Tibet operation , and by the Tibetan government - in - exile . Laos . The agency was impressed with Poshepny ' s ability to train paramilitary forces quickly and awarded him the Intelligence Star in 1959 . Two years later , he was assigned with J . Vinton Lawrence to train Hmong hill tribes in Laos to fight North Vietnam ese and Pathet Lao forces . In Laos , Poshepny gained the respect of the Hmong forces with practices that were barbaric by agency standards . He paid Hmong fighters to bring him the ears of dead enemy soldiers , and , on at least one occasion , he mailed a bag of ears to the US embassy in Vientiane to prove his body counts . He dropped severed heads onto enemy locations twice in a grisly form of psy - ops . Although his orders were only to train forces , he also went into battle with them and was wounded several times by shrapnel . Over several years , Poshepny grew disillusioned with the government ' s management of the war . He accused then - Laotian Major General Vang Pao of using the war , and CIA assets , to enrich himself through the opium trade . The CIA extracted Poshepny from Laos in 1970 and reassigned him to a training camp in Thailand until his retirement in 1974 . He received another Intelligence Star in 1975 . Retirement . After the war Poshepny remained in Thailand with his Hmong wife and four children . He moved the family to California in the 1990s . He frequently appeared at Hmong veteran gatherings and helped veterans immigrate and settle in the US . He freely admitted his actions during the war to reporters and historians , saying they were a necessary response to communist aggression . Several press stories have suggested that Poshepny was the model for Colonel Walter Kurtz in the film " Apocalypse Now " , but both Poshepny and director Francis Ford Coppola have denied the connection .