When the Washington-backed Lao royal government fell in 1975, General Pao was airlifted to Thailand and, along with other Hmong, resettled in the United States.

 From exile, the fervent anti-communist remained a leader of the Hmong community and a defender of the minority, many of whose members, according to human rights groups, are still persecuted and killed in isolated Laos.

 On Monday, at age 77, Pao was arrested in California along with eight others, charged with plotting to overthrow the Lao government using explosives, AK-47 assault rifles and Stinger surface-to-air missiles.

 The nine suspects, according to the criminal complaint, wanted to bomb Lao government buildings and make them "look like the results of the attack upon the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001."

 Pao was born in 1931 in central Xieng Khouang province. His community, the Hmong, are a mountain people from China who practiced slash-and-burn farming, grew opium and were known in Laos by the pejorative Meo, or "savage."

 A teenage soldier against World War II Japanese troops, he underwent French-run army officer training from age 20 and later fought against communist rebels.

 He rose in the Royal Lao Army and in 1964 became the first Lao Hmong to achieve the rank of general.

 The United States was then stepping up its undeclared war against Lao and Vietnamese communist forces in the landlocked country, training a proxy army and flying missions in unmarked aircraft of the CIA-run Air America.

 From the mid-60s, Pao commanded the irregular army of Hmong, other Lao fighters and Thai mercenaries from his Long Cheng mountain headquarters in a campaign that some historians contend was part-financed by the opium trade.

 "Operational advice was given by a small number of CIA operatives, writes Australian historian Grant Evans. "All was paid for by US aid."

 Pao could supply rice and medical supplies to villagers and even control US air power, gaining him "the status of a minor deity" among his soldiers, writes another author, Christopher Robbins.

 "But mostly his leadership rested on the force of his own personality, which was energetic, volatile, direct and fearless," Robbins writes in "The Ravens -- Pilots of the Secret War in Laos."

 After 1975, the new Lao government jailed tens of thousands people, and around 300,000 Lao, about half of them Hmong, fled the country.

 But some of Pao's fighters continued a low-level insurgency that has since been all but crushed.

 Their descendants have paid a high price, with up to 3,000 Hmong men, women and children still in hiding and under attack, according to overseas Hmong and international human rights groups.

 Amnesty International said this year that the Lao army continues to "regularly attack their temporary encampments, killing and injuring them, perpetuating their life on the run" -- charges the Lao government denies.

 Pao, a naturalised US citizen, meanwhile led a movement that brought thousands of Hmong refugees to the United States.

 He never gave up the dream of leading his people back to Laos, but his public influence had faded in recent years along with memories of the war.

 That was until Monday's pre-dawn raids, when hundreds of US federal agents arrested Pao and the other suspects, accused of planning to fight once more in their distant homeland.

 US Attorney McGregor Scott, announcing the arrests, said: "The United States cannot provide a safe harbour to those plotting to overthrow a government with whom we are at peace."

Agence France Presse