"He died today... the family was there," said a spokeswoman for the Clovis Community Medical Center, some 200 miles (322 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco, adding that he had been at the facility since December 26.

A general in the Royal Lao army and member of the Hmong ethnic minority, Vang Pao ran an irregular army in the 1960s and 70s, commanding thousands of fighters in the US-funded covert war against Vietnamese and Lao communist forces.

He fled to the United States in 1975 after communists ousted Laos' royal rulers, and was credited with helping negotiate the resettlement in America of tens of thousands of fellow Hmong.

Charlie Waters, one of his closest friends, said Vang Pao died after being admitted to hospital with pneumonia, complicated by heart problems.

But he said the former general had been active until the last for the local Hmong community, which numbers some 30,000 to 40,000 in California. Tens of thousands of Hmong also live in the northern state of Minnesota.

"He's been pushing for so many things for his people... up until the day they put him in the hospital," Waters told AFP, adding: "He was just tired. He was available for his people around the clock."

"He was a very loving person. He was like a father to his people, his Hmong people (and) he'll be remmebered as a great general, a great warrior, a great Hmong soldier."

Thousands of ethnic Hmong and others are expected to attend his funeral, which is planned to be held in nearby Fresno, according to Waters.

For decades Vang Pao remained a revered figure in the Hmong community. Many considered the fervent anti-communist their leader in exile, and he was an active defender of the minority, many of whose members, according to human rights groups, are still persecuted and killed in isolated Laos.

But he was also a polarizing figure, one who controversially raised money from the Hmong community through a secretive organization that some critics believed was being used to funnel money into support of a new rebellion against Vientiane authorities.

In 2007 Vang Pao was arrested in California along with eight others on conspiracy charges after authorities allegedly "interrupted a plot to overthrow the government of Laos by force and violence" according to the justice department. The charges were dropped in 2009.

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. In 1964 he became the first Hmong to achieve the rank of general in the Royal Lao army.

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, Vang Pao commanded the irregular army of Hmong, other Lao fighters and Thai mercenaries from his 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."

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