ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
. . . to Len Osanic and all
at Bandit Productions for bringing all my work back to life.
. . . to Patrick Fourmy, Dave Ratcliffe and Tom Davis, old friends who have
insisted I revise and re-write this old "classic".
. . . to Bill Mullan, Charlie Czapar,
Bill Peters, and Dave Fleming, who worked with me in the Pentagon during the
fifties, for those fascinating years with "Team B" in Headquarters,
U.S. Air Force.
. . . to Charles Peters of The Washington Monthly for publishing
the first "Secret Team" article, and Derek Shearer for breathing the
whole concept into life.
. . . to General Graves B. (the big
"E") Erskine and General Victor H. ("Brute") Krulak, both
of the U. S. Marine Corps, my immediate "bosses" and good friends, in
the Office of the Secretary of Defense and in the Office of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, for close personal relationships that shaped the course of these events.
. . . and to the hundreds of men with
whom I shared these experiences and who must remain nameless and silent because
that is the "code" of their chosen profession.
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AUTHOR'S NOTE: 1997
After I had given the manuscript of the original draft of this book to my editor at Prentice-Hall, in 1972; and had received the galley proof of the first edition back from him, he called me to suggest that I keep it in a safe place at all times. He told me that his home had been broken into the night before, and he suspected it was an attempt to steal his copy of that galley proof. He said, "They didn't get it. It was under the seat of the Volkswagon."
A
few days later a nationwide release by the well-known Washington columnist,
Jack Anderson, appeared across the country, "Book Bares CIA's Dirty
Tricks". In that column, Anderson reported that the CIA had contacted a
well-known bookstore in Washington and asked one of the employees to see if he
could get a copy of the galley from me, and agreed to pay him $500, if he did.
I agreed to meet him at my home that evening.
I
suspected his call, but invited him anyway. In the meantime I set up a tape
recorder in the umbrella stand near my front door and arranged for it to turn
on when I switched on the overhead light on the front porch. With that
arrangement, I recorded the whole visit including his final burst, "They
promised me $500.00, if I got that galley proof." I took that tape to Anderson,
and it was the basis of his March 6, 1973 column. The underground attack didn't
quit there.
After
excellent early sales of The Secret Team
during which Prentice-Hall printed three editions of the book, and it had received
more than 100 favorable reviews, I was invited to meet Ian Ballantine, the
founder of Ballantine Books. He told me that he liked the book and would
publish 100,000 copies in paperback as soon as he could complete the deal with
Prentice-Hall. Soon there were 100,000 paperbacks in bookstores all around the
country.
Then
one day a business associate in Seattle called to tell me that the bookstore
next to his office building had had a window full of books the day before, and
none the day of his call. They claimed they had never had the book. I called
other associates around the country. I got the same story from all over the
country. The paperback had vanished. At the same time I learned that Mr.
Ballantine had sold his company. I traveled to New York to visit the new
"Ballantine Books" president. He professed to know nothing about me,
and my book. That was the end of that surge of publication. For some unknown
reason Prentice-Hall was out of my book also. It became an extinct species.
Coincidental
to that, I received a letter from a Member of Parliament in Canberra,
Australia, who wrote that he had been in England recently visiting in the home
of a friend who was a Member of the British Parliament. While there, he
discovered The Secret Team on a
coffee table and during odd hours had begun to read it.
Upon
return to Canberra he sent his clerk to get him a copy of the book. Not finding
it in the stores, the clerk had gone to the Customs Office where he learned
that 3,500 copies of The Secret Team
had arrived, and on that same date had been purchased by a Colonel from the
Royal Australian Army. The book was dead everywhere.
The
campaign to kill the book was nationwide and world-wide. It was removed from
the Library of Congress and from College libraries as letters I received
attested all too frequently.
That
was twenty years ago. Today I have been asked to rewrite the book and bring it
up to date. Those who have the book speak highly of it, and those who do not
have it have been asking for it. With that incentive, I have begun from page
one to bring it up to date and to provide information that I have learned since
my first manuscript.
In
the beginning, this book was based upon my unusual experience in the Pentagon
during 1955-1964 and the concept of the book itself was the outgrowth of a
series of luncheon conversations, 1969-1970, with my friends Bob Myers,
Publisher of the New Republic,
Charlie Peters, founder of The Washington
Monthly, and Ben Schemmer, editor and publisher of the Armed Forces Journal, and Derek Shearer. They were all experienced
in the ways and games played in Washington, and they tagged my stories those of
a "Secret Team." This idea grew and was polished during many
subsequent luncheons.
After
my retirement from the Air Force, 1964, I moved from an office in the Joint
Chiefs of Staff area of the Pentagon to become Manager of the Branch Bank on
the Concourse of that great building. This was an interesting move for many
reasons, not the least of which was that it kept me in business and social
contact with many of the men I had met and worked with during my nine years of
Air Force duties in that building. It kept me up-to-date with the old
"fun-and-games" gang.
After
graduating from the Graduate School of Banking, University of Wisconsin, I
transfered to a bank in Washington where in the course of business I met Ben
Schemmer. He needed a loan that would enable him to acquire the old Armed Forces Journal. During that
business process I met two of Ben's friends Bob Myers and Charlie Peters. We
spent many most enjoyable business luncheons together. This is where "The
Secret Team" emerged from a pattern of ideas to a manuscript.
As
they heard my stories about my work with the CIA, and especially about the role
of the military in support of the world-wide, clandestine operations of the
CIA, they urged me to write about those fascinating nine years of a 23-year
military career. During the Spring of 1970 I put an article together that we
agreed to call "The Secret Team", and Charlie Peters published it in
the May 1970 issue of The Washington
Monthly.
Before
I had seen the published article myself, two editors of major publishers in New
York called me and asked for appointments. I met with both, and agreed to
accept the offer to write a book of the same name, and same concept of The Secret Team from Bram Cavin, Senior
Editor with Prentice-Hall.
After
all but finishing the manuscript, with my inexperienced typing of some 440
pages, I sat down to a Sunday breakfast on June 13, 1971 and saw the headlines
of the New York Times with its
publication of the "purloined" Pentagon
Papers.[1] One of the first excerpts from those papers was a TOP
SECRET document that I had worked on in late 1963. Then I found
more of the same. With that, I knew that I could vastly improve what I had been
writing by making use of that hoard of classified material that "Daniel
Ellsberg had left on the doorstep of the Times,"
and other papers. Up until that time I had deliberately avoided the use of some
of my old records and copies of highly classified documents. The publication of
the Pentagon Papers changed all that.
They were now in the public domain. I decided to call my editor and tell him
what we had with the "Pentagon Papers" and to ask for more time to
re-write my manuscript. He agreed without hesitation. From that time on I began
my "Doctorate" course in, a) book publishing and, b) book
annihilation.
As
we see, by some time in 1975 The Secret
Team was extinct; but unlike the dinosaur and others, it did not even leave
its footprints in the sands of time. There may be some forty to fifty thousand
copies on private book shelves. A letter from a professor informed me that his
department had ordered more than forty of the books to be kept on the shelves
of his university library for assignment purposes. At the start of the new
school year his students reported that the books were not on the shelves and
the registry cards were not in the master file. The librarians informed them
that the book did not exist.
With
that letter in mind, I dropped into the Library of Congress to see if The Secret Team was on the shelves where
I had seen it earlier. It was not, and it was not even in that library's master
file. It is now an official non-book.
I
was a writer whose book had been cancelled by a major publisher and a major
paperback publisher under the persuasive hand of the CIA. Now, after more than
twenty years the flames of censorship still sweep across the land. Despite
that, here we go again with a new revised edition of The Secret Team.
_______
1. Any reader of the "Pentagon
Papers" should be warned that although they were commissioned on June 17,
1967, by the Secretary of Defense as "the history of United States
involvement in Vietnam from World War II [Sept 2, 1945] to the present"
[1968], they are unreliable, inaccurate and marred by serious omissions. They
are a contrived history, at best, even though they were written by a selected
Task Force under Pentagon leadership.
PREFACE
1972
From
President to Ambassador, Cabinet Officer to Commanding General, and from
Senator to executive assistant-all these men have their sources of information
and guidance. Most of this information and guidance is the result of carefully
laid schemes and ploys of pressure groups.In this influential coterie one of
the most interesting and effective roles is that played by the behind the
scenes, faceless, nameless, ubiquitous briefing officer.
He
is the man who sees the President, the Secretary, the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff almost daily, and who carries with him the most skillfully
detailed information. He is trained by years of experience in the precise way
to present that information to assure its effectiveness. He comes away day
after day knowing more and more about the man he has been briefing and about
what it is that the truly influential pressure groups at the center of power
and authority are really trying to tell these key decision makers. In
Washington, where such decisions shape and shake the world, the role of the
regular briefing officer is critical.
Leaders
of government and of the great power centers regularly leak information of all
kinds to columnists, television and radio commentators, and to other media
masters with the hope that the material will surface and thus influence the
President, the Secretary, the Congress, and the public. Those other inside
pressure groups with their own briefing officers have direct access to the top
men; they do not have to rely upon the media, although they make great use of
it. They are safe and assured in the knowledge that they can get to the
decision maker directly. They need no middleman other than the briefing
officer. Such departments as Defense, State, and the CIA use this technique
most effectively.
For
nine consecutive, long years during those crucial days from 1955 through
January 1, 1964, I was one of those briefing officers. I had the unique
assignment of being the "Focal Point" officer for contacts between
the CIA and the Department of Defense on matters pertaining to the military
support of the Special Operations[1] of that Agency. In that capacity I worked with Allen
Dulles and John Foster Dulles, several Secretaries of Defense, and Chairmen of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as many others in key governmental places.
My work took me to more than sixty countries and to CIA offices and covert
activities all over the world--from such hot spots as Saigon and to such remote
places as the South Pole. Yes, there have been secret operations in Antarctica.
It
was my job not only to brief these men, but to brief them from the point of
view of the CIA so that I might win approval of the projects presented and of
the accompanying requests for support from the military in terms of money,
manpower, facilities, and materials. I was, during this time, perhaps the best
informed "Focal Point" officer among the few who operated in this
very special area. The role of the briefing officer is quiet, effective, and
most influential; and, in the CIA, specialized in the high art of top level
indoctrination.
It
cannot be expected that a John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, a Richard Nixon, or a
following President will have experienced and learned all the things that may
arise to confront him during his busy official life in the White House. It
cannot be expected that a Robert McNamara or a Melvin Laird, a Dean Rusk or a
William Rogers, etc. comes fully equipped to high office, aware of all matters
pertaining to what they will encounter in their relationship with the Congo or
Cuba, Vietnam or Pakistan, and China or Russia and the emerging new nations.
These men learn about these places and the many things that face them from day
to day from an endless and unceasing procession of briefing officers.
Henry
Kissinger was a briefing officer. General John Vogt was one of the best.
Desmond Fitzgerald, Tracy Barnes, Ed Lansdale, and "Brute" Krulak, in
their own specialties, were top-flight briefing officers on subjects that until
the publication of the "Pentagon Papers," few people had ever seen in
print or had ever even contemplated.
(You
can imagine my surprise when I read the June 13, 1971, issue of the Sunday New York Times and saw there among the
"Pentagon Papers" a number of basic information papers that had been
in my own files in the Joint Chiefs of Staff area of the Pentagon. Most of the
papers of that period had been source documents from which I had prepared
dozens -- even hundreds -- of briefings, for all kinds of projects, to be given
to top Pentagon officers. Not only had many of those papers been in my files,
but I had either written many of them myself or had written certain of the
source documents used by the men who did.)
The
briefing officer, with the staff officer, writes the basic papers. He
researches the papers. He has been selected because he has the required
knowledge and experience. He has been to the countries and to the places
involved. He may know the principals in the case well. He is supposed to be the
best man available for that special job. In my own case, I had been on many
special assignments dating back to the Cairo and Teheran conferences of late
1943 that first brought together the "Big Four" of the Allied nations
of WW II: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek and Joseph
Stalin.
The
briefing officer reads all of the messages, regardless of classification. He
talks to a number of other highly qualified men. He may even have staff
specialists spread out all over the world upon whom he may call at any time for
information. Working in support of the "Focal Point" office, which I
headed, there were hundreds of experts and agents concealed in military
commands throughout the world who were part of a network I had been directed to
establish in 1955-1956 as a stipulation of National Security Council directive
5412, March 1954.
In
government official writing, the man who really writes the paper--or more
properly, the men whose original work and words are put together to become the
final paper--are rarely, if ever, the men whose names appear on that paper. A
paper attributed to Maxwell Taylor, Robert McNamara or Dean Rusk, of the
Kennedy era, would not, in almost all instances, have been written by them; but
more than likely would have been assembled from information gathered from the Departments
of Defense and State and from CIA sources and put into final language by such a
man as General Victor H. Krulak, who was among the best of that breed of
official writers.
From
l955 through 1963, if some official wanted a briefing on a highly classified
subject involving the CIA, I would be one of those called upon to prepare the
material and to make the briefing. At the same time, if the CIA wanted support
from the Air Force for some covert operation, I was the officer who had been officially
designated to provide this special operational support to the CIA.
If
I was contacted by the CIA to provide support for an operation which I believed
the Secretary of Defense had not been previously informed of, I would see to it
that he got the necessary briefing from the CIA or from my office and that any
other Chief of Staff who might be involved would get a similar briefing. In
this unusual business I found rather frequently that the CIA would be well on
its way into some operation that would later require military support before
the Secretary and the Chiefs had been informed.
During
preparations for one of the most important of these operations, covered in some
detail in this book, I recall briefing the chairman of the Joint Chief's of
Staff, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, on the subject of the largest clandestine
special operation that the CIA had ever mounted up to that time: and then
hearing him say to the other Chiefs, "I just can't believe it. I never
knew that."
Here
was the nation's highest ranking military officer, the man who would be held
responsible for the operation should it fail or become compromised, and he had
not been told enough about it to know just how it was being handled. Such is
the nature of the game as played by the "Secret Team."
I
have written for several magazines on this subject, among them the Armed Forces Journal, The New Republic, the Empire Magazine of the Denver Sunday Post, and The Washington Monthly. It was for this latter publication that I
wrote "The Secret Team", an article that appeared in the May 1970
issue and that led to the development of this book.
With
the publication of the "Pentagon Papers" on June 13,1971, interest in
this subject area was heightened and served to underscore my conviction that
the scope of that article must be broadened into a book.
Within
days of The New York Times
publication of those "Pentagon Papers," certain editorial personnel
with the BBC-TV program, "Twenty-Four Hours", recalling my
"Secret Team" article, invited me to appear on a series on TV with,
among others, Daniel Ellsberg. They felt that my experience with the Secret
Team would provide material for an excellent companion piece to the newly released
"Pentagon Papers," which were to be the primary topic of the
discussions. I flew to London and made a number of programs for BBC-TV and
Radio. Legal problems and the possible consequences of his departure from the
country at that time precluded the simultaneous appearance of Daniel Ellsberg.
The programs got wide reception and served to underscore how important the
subject of the "Pentagon Papers" is throughout the world.
I
have not chosen to reveal and to expose "unreleased" classified
documents; but I do believe that those that have been revealed, both in the
"Pentagon Papers" and elsewhere, need to be interpreted and fully
explained. I am interested in setting forth and explaining what
"secrecy" and the "cult of containment" really mean and
what they have done to our way of life and to our country. Furthermore, I want
to correct any disinformation that may have been given by those who have tried
to write on these subjects in other related histories.
I
have lived this type of work; I know what happened and how it happened. I have
known countless men who participated in one way or another in these unusual
events of Twentieth Century history. Many of these men have been and still are
members of the Secret Team. It also explains why much of it has been pure
propaganda and close to nationwide "brainwashing" of the American
public. I intend to interpret and clarify these events by analyzing information
already in the public domain. There is plenty.
Few
concepts during this half century have been as important, as controversial, as
misunderstood, and as misinterpreted as secrecy in Government. No idea during
this period has had a greater impact upon Americans and upon the American way
of life than that of the containment of Communism. Both are inseparably
intertwined and have nurtured each other in a blind Pavlovian way.
Understanding their relationship is a matter of fundamental importance.
Much
has been written on these subjects and on their vast supporting infrastructure,
generally known as the "intelligence community." Some of this
historical writing has suffered from a serious lack of inside knowledge and
experience. Most of this writing has been done by men who know something about
the subject, by men who have researched and learned something about the
subject, and in a few cases by men who had some experience with the subject.
Rarely is there enough factual experience on the part of the writer. On the
other hand, the Government and other special interests have paid writers huge amounts
to write about this subject as they want it done, not truthfully. Thus our
history is seriously warped and biased by such work.
Many
people have been so concerned about what has been happening to our Government
that they have dedicated themselves to investigating and exposing its evils.
Unfortunately, a number of these writers have been dupes of those cleverer than
they or with sinister reasons for concealing knowledge. They have written what
they thought was the truth, only to find out (if they ever did find out) that
they had been fed a lot of contrived cover stories and just plain hogwash. In
this book I have taken extracts from some of this writing and, line by line,
have shown how it has been manipulated to give a semblance of truth while at
the same time being contrived and false.
Nevertheless,
there have been some excellent books in this broad area. But many of these
books suffer from various effects of the dread disease of secrecy and from its
equally severe corollary illness called "cover" (the CIA's official
euphemism for not telling the truth).
The
man who has not lived in the secrecy and intelligence environment--really lived
in it and fully experienced it--cannot write accurately about it. There is no
substitute for the day to day living of a life in which he tells his best
friends and acquaintances, his family and his everyday contacts one story while
he lives another. The man who must depend upon research and investigation
inevitably falls victim to the many pitfalls of the secret world and of the
"cover story" world with its lies and counter-lies.
A
good example of this is the work of Les Gelb and his Pentagon associates on the
official version of the purloined "Pentagon Papers." That very title
is the biggest cover story (no pun intended) of them all; so very few of those
papers were really of Pentagon origin. The fact that I had many of them in my
office of Special Operations in Joint Staff area, and that most of them had
been in the files of the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for
International Security Affairs did not validate the locale of their origin.
They were "working copies" and not originals. Notice how few were
signed by true military officers.
It
is significant to note that the historical record that has been called the
"Pentagon Papers" was actually a formal government-funded "study
of the history of United States involvement in Vietnam from World War II to the
present" i.e. 1945 to 1968. On June 17, 1967 the Secretary of Defense,
Robert S. McNamara directed that work. A task force consisting of "six
times six professionals" under the direction of Leslie H. Gelb produced
"37 studies and 15 collections of documents in 43 volumes" that were
presented on January 15, 1969 to the then-Secretary of Defense, Clark M.
Clifford by Mr. Gelb with the words from Herman Melville's Moby Dick:
"This
is a world of chance, free will, and necessity-all interweavingly working
together as one: chance by turn rules either and had the last featuring blow at
events."
As
you may recall, this treasure trove of TOP SECRET papers was delivered to the New York Times, and other newspapers in
mid-June, 1971, by a then-unknown "Hippie" of that period. His name
was Daniel Ellsberg. What few people have learned since that time is the fact
that both Daniel Ellsberg, who pirated these highly classified papers, and
Leslie Gelb the Director of that Task Force, had worked in that same office of
International Security Affairs (ISA).
The
"misappropriation" of those documents was not the work of some
"true patriots" as Noam Chomsky wrote in 1972. Rather it was an
inside job. That ISA office had been the home of many of the "big
names" of the Vietnam War period, among them Paul H. Nitze, John T.
McNaughton, Paul C. Warnke and William Bundy, among others. The fact that I had
many of them in my office, that I had worked with them, and that I had written
parts of some of them proves that they were not genuine Pentagon papers,
because my work at that time was devoted to support of the CIA. The same is
true of General Krulak, William Bundy, and to a degree, Maxwell Taylor among
others.
To
look at this matter in another way, the man who has lived and experienced this
unnatural existence becomes even more a victim of its unreality. He becomes
enmeshed beyond all control upon the horns of a cruel dilemma. On the one hand,
his whole working life has been dedicated to the cause of secrecy and to its
protection by means of cover stories (lies). In this pursuit he has given of
himself time after time to pledges, briefings, oaths, and deep personal
conviction regarding the significance of that work. Even if he would talk and
write, his life has been so interwoven into the fabric of the real and the
unreal, the actual and the cover story, that he would be least likely to
present the absolutely correct data.
On
the other hand, as a professional he would have been subjected to such
cellurization and compartmentalization each time he became involved in any real
"deep" operation that he would not have known the whole story anyhow.
This compartalization is very real. I have worked on projects with many CIA men
so unaware of the entire operation that they had no realization and awareness
of the roles of other CIA men working on the same project.
I
would know of this because inevitably somewhere along the line both groups
would come to the Department of Defense for hardware support. I actually
designed a special office in the Pentagon with but one door off the corridor.
Inside, it had a single room with one secretary. However, off her office there
was one more door that led to two more offices with a third doorway leading to
yet another office, which was concealed by the door from the secretary's room.
I had to do this because at times we had CIA groups with us who were now
allowed to meet each other, and who most certainly would not have been there
had they known that the others were there. (For the record, the office was
4D1000--it may have been changed by now; but it had remained that way for many
years.)
Another
group of writers, about the world of secrecy, are the "masters"--men
like Allen W. Dulles, Lyman Kirkpatrick, Peer de Silva and Chester Cooper. My
own choice of the best of these are Peer de Silva and Lyman Kirkpatrick. These
are thoroughly professional intelligence officers who have chosen a career of
high-level intelligence operations. Their writing is correct and
informative--to a degree beyond that which most readers will be able to
translate and comprehend at first reading; yet they are properly circumspect
and guarded and very cleverly protective of their profession.
There
is another category of writer and self-proclaimed authority on the subjects of
secrecy, intelligence, and containment. This man is the suave, professional
parasite who gains a reputation as a real reporter by disseminating the scraps
and "Golden Apples" thrown to him by the great men who use him. This
writer seldom knows and rarely cares that many of the scraps from which he
draws his material have been planted, that they are controlled leaks, and that
he is being used, and glorified as he is being used, by the inside secret
intelligence community.
Allen
Dulles had a penchant for cultivating a number of such writers with big names
and inviting them to his table for a medieval style luncheon in that great room
across the hall from his own offices in the old CIA headquarters on the hill
overlooking Foggy Bottom. Here, he would discuss openly and all too freely the
same subjects that only hours before had been carefully discussed in the secret
inner chambers of the operational side of that quiet Agency. In the hands of
Allen Dulles, "secrecy" was simply a chameleon device to be used as
he saw fit and to be applied to lesser men according to his schemes. It is
quite fantastic to find people like Daniel Ellsberg being charged with leaking
official secrets simply because the label on the piece of paper said "TOP
SECRET," when the substance of many of the words written on those same
papers was patently untrue and no more than a cover story. Except for the fact
that they were official "lies",
these papers had no basis in fact, and therefore no basis to be graded TOP
SECRET or any other degree of classification. Allen Dulles would tell similar
cover stories to his coterie of writers, and not long thereafter they would
appear in print in some of the most prestigious papers and magazines in the
country, totally unclassified, and of course, cleverly untrue.
Lastly
there is the writer from outside this country who has gained his inside
information from sources in another country. These sources are no doubt
reliable; they know exactly what has taken place -- as in Guatemala during the
Bay of Pigs era -- and they can speak with some freedom. In other cases, the
best of these sources have been from behind the Iron Curtain.
In
every case, the chance for complete information is very small, and the hope
that in time researchers, students, and historians will be able to ferret out
truth from untruth, real from unreal, and story from cover story is at best a
very slim one. Certainly, history teaches us that one truth will add to and
enhance another; but let us not forget that one lie added to another lie will
demolish everything. This is the important point.
Consider
the past half century. How many major events--really major events--have there
been that simply do not ring true? How many times has the entire world been
shaken by alarms of major significance, only to find that the events either did
not happen at all, or if they did, that they had happened in a manner quite
unlike the original story? The war in Vietnam is undoubtedly the best example
of this. Why is it that after more than thirty years of clandestine and overt
involvement in Indochina, no one had been able to make a logical case for what
we had been doing there and to explain adequately why we had become involved;
and what our real and valid objectives in that part of the world were?
The
mystery behind all of this lies in the area we know as "Clandestine
activity", "intelligence operations", "secrecy", and
"cover stories", used on a national and international scale. It is
the object of this book to bring reality and understanding into this vast
unknown area.
L.
FLETCHER PROUTY
Colonel, U.S. Air Force (Ret'd)
Colonel, U.S. Air Force (Ret'd)
_______
1. Special Operations is a name given in
most cases, but not always, to any clandestine, covert, undercover, or secret
operations by the government or by someone, U.S. citizen or a foreign national
. . . even in special cases a stateless professional, or U.S. or foreign
activity or organization. It is usually secret and highly classified. It is to
be differentiated from Secret intelligence and in a very parochial sense from
Secret or Special Intelligence Operations.
PREFACE
TO THE SECOND EDITION
Like
it or not, we now live in a new age of "One World." This is the age
of global companies, of global communications and transport, of global food
supply and finance and...just around the corner...global accommodation of
political systems. In this sense, there are no home markets, no isolated
markets and no markets outside the global network. It is time to face the fact
that true national sovereignty no longer exists. We live in a world of big
business, big lawyers, big bankers, even bigger moneymen and big politicians.
It is the world of "The Secret Team."
In
such a world, the Secret Team is a dominant power. It is neither military nor
police. It is covert, and the best (or worst) of both. It gets the job done
whether it has political authorization and direction, or not. It is
independent. It is lawless.
This
book is about the real CIA and its allies around the world. It is based upon
personal experience generally derived from work in the Pentagon from 1955 to
1964. At retirement, I was Chief of Special Operations (clandestine activities)
with the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. These duties involved the military support
of the clandestine activities of the CIA and were performed under the
provisions of National Security Council Directive No. 5412/2.
Since
this book was first published in 1973, we have witnessed the unauthorized
release of the "Pentagon Papers," "Watergate" and the
resignation of President Nixon, the run-away activities of the "Vietnam
War", the "Arab Oil Embargo" that led to the greatest financial
heist in history, and the blatantly unlawful "Iran-Contra" affair.
All of these were brought about and master-minded by a renegade "Secret
Team" that operated secretly, without Presidential direction; without
National Security Council approval -- so they say; and, generally, without
Congressional knowledge. This trend increases. Its scope expands...even today.
I
was the first author to point out that the CIA's most important "Cover
Story is that of an "Intelligence" agency. Of course the CIA does
make use of "intelligence" and "intelligence gathering",
but that is largely a front for its primary interest, "Fun and
Games." The CIA is the center of a vast mechanism that specializes in
Covert Operations...or as Allen Dulles used to call it, "Peacetime
Operations". In this sense, the CIA is the willing tool of a higher level
Secret Team, or High Cabal, that usually includes representatives of the CIA
and other instrumentalities of the government, certain cells of the business
and professional world and, almost always, foreign participation. It is this
Secret Team, its allies, and its method of operation that are the principal
subjects of this book.
It
must be made clear that at the heart of Covert Operations is the denial by the
"operator," i.e. the U.S. Government, of the existence of national
sovereignty. The Covert operator can, and does, make the world his
playground...including the U.S.A.
Today,
early 1990, the most important events of this century are taking place with the
ending of the "Cold War" era, and the beginning of the new age of
"One World" under the control of businessmen and their lawyers,
rather than the threat of military power. This scenario for change has been
brought about by a series of Secret Team operations skillfully orchestrated
while the contrived hostilities of the Cold War were at their zenith.
Chief
among these, yet quite unnoticed, President Nixon and his Secretary of the
Treasury, George Schultz, established a Russian/American organization called
the "USA-USSR Trade and Economic Council," in 1972. Its objective was
to bring about a union of the Fortune 500 Chief Executive Officers of this
country, among others, such as the hierarchy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,
with their counterparts in the Soviet Union. This important relationship,
sponsored by David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank and his associates,
continued through the Carter years. The bilateral activity increased
significantly during the Reagan/Shultz years of the Eighties despite such
"Evil Empire" tantrums as the Korean Airlines Boeing 747 Flight 007
"shootdown" in 1983.
It
is this "US-TEC" organization, with its counterpart bilateral
agreements among other nations and the USSR, that has brought about the massive
Communist world changes.
The
Cold War has been the most expensive war in history. R. Buckminister Fuller has
written in Grunch of Giants:
We
can very properly call World War I the million dollar war and World War II the
billion dollar war and World War III (Cold War) the trillion dollar war.
The
power structure that kept the Cold War at that level of intensity has been
driven by the Secret Team and its multinational covert operations, to wit:
This
is the fundamental game of the Secret Team. They have this power because they
control secrecy and secret intelligence and because they have the ability to
take advantage of the most modern communications system in the world, of global
transportation systems, of quantities of weapons of all kinds, of a world-wide
U.S. military supporting base structure. They can use the finest intelligence
system in the world, and most importantly, they are able to operate under the
canopy of an ever-present "enemy" called "Communism". And
then, to top all of this, there is the fact that the CIA has assumed the right
to generate and direct secret operations.
--L.
Fletcher Prouty
Alexandria, VA 1990
Alexandria, VA 1990
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PREFACE: "THE SECRET TEAM II" 1997
Like
it or not, we now live in the age of "One World". This is the age of
global companies, of global communications and transport, of global food supply
and finance and ... just around the corner ... global accommodation of
political systems. In this sense, there are no home markets, no isolated
markets and no markets outside the global network.
It
is time to face the fact that true national sovereignty no longer exists. We
live in a world of big business, big lawyers, big bankers, even bigger
money-men and big politicians. It is the world of "The Secret Team"
and its masters. We are now, despite common mythology to the contrary, the most
dependent society that has ever lived, and the future of the viability of that
infrastructure of that society is unpredictable. It is crumbling.
As
one of the greatest historians of all time, Ibn Khaldun, wrote in his unequaled
historical work The Muqaddimah of the
14th Century:
God created and fashioned man in a form
that can live and subsist only with the help of food ... Through cooperation,
the needs of a number of persons, many times greater than their own number, can
be satisfied.
As
this One World infrastructure emerges it increases the percentage of our total
dependence upon remote food production capacity to the mass production
capability and transport means of enormous companies operating under the global
policy guidance of such organizations as the Chartered Institute of Transport
in London, and the international banking community. As individuals, few of us
would have any idea where to get a loaf of bread or yard of fabric other than
in some supermarket and department store ... and we are all dependent upon some
form of efficient transport, electric power, gasoline at the pump, and
boundless manufacturing capacity and versatility. Let that system collapse, at
any point, and all of us will be helpless. A cooperating, working system is
essential to survival; yet over-all it is a system without leadership and
guidance.
At
the same time the traditional family farm, and even community farms and
industries, have all but vanished from the scene. This has created, at least in
what we label, the advanced nations, a dearth of farmers and of people who have
that basic experience along with that required in the food and home products
industries. Furthermore, as this trend is amplified, the transport of farm
produce has become increasingly assigned to the trucking industry, which has
its over-land limits ... mostly as applied to the tonnage limits of rural
bridges, and the economical availability of petroleum.
As
a result, something as simple as a trucking industry strike that keeps trucks
out of any city for seventy- two hours or more, will lead to starvation and
food riots. None of us know where to get food, if it is not in the nearby
supermarket; and if we do have a stored supply of food locked in the cellar, we
shall simply be the targets of those who do not. Food is the ultimate driving
force. Under such predictable conditions, there will be waves of slaughter and
eventually cannibalism. Man must eat, and the only way he can obtain adequate
food supplies is through cooperation and the means to transport and distribute
food and other basic necessities. This essential role is being diminished
beyond the borderline. The lack of food supplies has already resulted in a form
of covert genocide in many countries. Other essential shortages unavoidably
follow.
As
Rudyard Kipling has said: "Transport is Civilization." The opposite
is equally true, "Without reliable transport we are reduced to the state
of barbarism."
These
are fundamental statements of fact. In such a world, the Secret Team is the
functional element of the dominant power. It is the point of the spear and is
neither military nor police. It is covert: and the best (or worst) of both. It
gets the job done whether it has political authorization and direction, or not.
In this capacity, it acts independently. It is lawless. It operates everywhere
with the best of all supporting facilities from special weaponry and advanced
communications, with the assurance that its members will never be prosecuted.
It is subservient to the Power Elite and protected by them. The Power Elite or
High Cabal need not be Royalty in these days. They are their equals or better.
Note
with care, it is labeled a "Team". This is because as with any highly
professional team it has its managers, its front office and its owners. These
are the "Power Elite" to whom it is beholden. They are always
anonymous, and their network is ancient and world-wide. Let us draw an example
from recent history.
During
the Senate Hearings of 1975 on "Alleged Assassination Ploys Involving
Foreign Leaders," Senator Charles C. Mathias' thoughts went back to
November 22, 1963 and to the coup d'etat brought about by the surgical
precision of the death of President John F. Kennedy, when he said:
Let
me draw an example from history. When Thomas Becket (Saint Thomas Becket,
1118-1170) was proving to be an annoyance, as Castro; the King said "Who
will rid me of this man?" He didn't say to somebody, go out and murder
him. He said who will rid me of this man, and let it go at that. (As you will
recall, Thomas Becket's threat was not against the King, it was against the way
the King wanted to run the government.)
With
no explicit orders, and with no more authority than that, four of King Henry's
knights, found and killed "this man", Saint Thomas Becket inside of
his church. That simple statement ... no more than a wish floating in air ...
proved to be all the orders needed.
Then,
with that great historical event in mind, Senator Mathias went on to say:
... that is typical of the kind of
thing which might be said, which might be taken by the Director of Central
Intelligence or by anybody else, as Presidential authorization to go forward
... you felt that some spark had been transmitted ...
To
this Senator Jesse Helms added:
Yes, and if he had disappeared from the
scene they would not have been unhappy.
There's
the point! Because the structure, a "Power Elite", "High
Cabal" or similar ultimate ruling organization, exists and the
psychological atmosphere has been prepared, nothing more has to be said than
that which ignites that "spark" of an assumed "authorization to
go forward." Very often, this is the way in which the Secret Team gets its
orders ... they are no more than "a wish floating in air."
This
book is about a major element of this real power structure of the world and of
its impact upon the CIA and its allies around the world. It is based upon much
personal experience generally derived from my military service from mid-1941 to
1964: U.S. Army Cavalry, U.S. Army Armored Force, U.S. Army Air Corps and Army
Air Force, and finally the U. S. Air Force; and more specifically from my
special assignments in the Pentagon from 1955 to 1964. At retirement, I was the
first Chief of Special Operations with the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. All of
these duties, during those Pentagon years, were structured to provide "the
military support of the world-wide clandestine activities of the CIA."
They were performed in accordance with the provisions of an Eisenhower era,
National Security Council Directive No. 5412/2, March 15, 1954.
Since
this book was first published in 1973, we have witnessed the unauthorized
release of the Defense Department's official " history of United States
involvement in Vietnam from World War II to 1969" popularly known as the
"Pentagon Papers," "Watergate" and the resignation of
President Nixon, the run away activities of the "Vietnam War," the
"Arab Oil Embargo" that led to the greatest financial heist in
history, the blatantly unlawful "Iran Contra" affair, and the
run-away banking scandals of the eighties. Many of these were brought about and
master minded by renegade "Secret Team" members who operated, without
Presidential direction; without National Security Council approval so they say;
and, generally, without official Congressional knowledge. This trend increases.
Its scope expands ... even today.
I
pointed out, years ago in public pronouncements, that the ClA's most important
"Cover Story" is that of an "intelligence" agency. Of
course the CIA does make use of "intelligence" and its assumed role
of "intelligence gathering," but that is largely a front for its
primary interest, "Fun and Games" ... as the "Old Boys" or
"Jedburgh's" of the WW II period Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
called it.
The
CIA is the center of a vast, and amorphous mechanism that specializes in Covert
Operations ... or as Allen Dulles always called it,"Peacetime Operations."
In this sense, the CIA is the willing tool of a higher level High Cabal, that
may include representatives and highly skilled agents of the CIA and other
instrumentality's of the government, certain cells of the business and
professional world and, almost always, foreign participation. It is this
ultimate Secret Team, its allies, and its method of operation that are the
principal subject of this book.
It
must be made clear that at the heart of Covert Operations is the denial by the
"operator," i.e. the U.S. Government, of the existence of national
sovereignty. The covert operator can, and does, make the world his playground
... including the U.S.A.
Today,
in the mid-1990's, the most important events of this century are taking place
with the ending of the "Cold War" era, and the beginning of the new
age of "One World" under the control of businessmen and their
lawyers, rather than under the threat of military power and ideological
differences. This scenario for change has been brought about by a series of
Secret Team operations skillfully orchestrated while the contrived hostilities
of the Cold War were at their zenith.
Two
important events of that period have been little noted. First, on Feb. 7, 1972
Maurice Stans, Nixon's Secretary of Commerce opened a "White House
Conference on the Industrial World Ahead, A Look at Business in 1990."
This three-day meeting of more than fifteen hundred of the country's leading
businessmen, scholars, and the like were concluded with this memorable summary
statement by Roy L. Ash, president of Litton Industries:
... state capitalism may well be a form
for world business in the world ahead; that the western countries are trending
toward a more unified and controlled economy, having a greater effect on all
business; and the communist nations are moving more and more toward a free
market system. The question posed during this conference on which a number of
divergent opinions arose, was whether 'East and West' would meet some place
toward the middle about 1990.
That
was an astounding forecast as we consider events of the seventies and eighties
and discover that his forecast, if it ever was a forecast and not a pre-planned
arrangement, was right on the nose.
This
amazing forecast had its antecedent pronouncements, among which was another
"One World" speech by this same Roy Ash during the Proceedings of the
American Bankers Association National Automation Conference in New York City,
May 8,9,10, 1967.
The
affairs of the world are becoming inextricably interlinked ... governments,
notably, cannot effectively perform the task of creating and distributing food
and other essential products and services ... economic development is the
special capability and function of business and industrial organizations ...
business organizations are the most efficient converters of the original
resources of the world into useable goods and services.
The
flash of genius, the new ideas, always comes from the marvelous workings of the
individual brain, not from the committee sessions. Organizations are to
implement ideas, not to have them.
As
a Charter Member of the American Bankers Association's Committee on Automation
Planning and Technology I was a panelist at that same convention as we worked
to convert the 14,000 banks of this country to automation and the ubiquitous
Credit Card. All of these subjects were signs of the times leading toward the
demise of the Soviet Union in favor of an evolutionary process toward One
World.
In
addition to the 1972 White House Conference on the Industrial World Ahead a
most significant yet quite unnoticed action took place during that same year
when President Nixon and his then-Secretary of the Treasury, George Shultz,
established a Russian/American organization called the "USA USSR Trade and
Economic Council." Its objective was to bring about a union of the Fortune
500 Chief Executive Officers of this country, among others, such as the
hierarchy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with their counterparts in the
Soviet Union. This important relationship, sponsored by David Rockefeller of
Chase Manhattan Bank and his associates, continues into the "One
World" years.
This
bilateral activity increased during the Reagan/Shultz years of the Eighties
despite such "Evil Empire" staged tantrums as the Korean Airlines
Boeing 747 Flight 007 "shootdown" in 1983.
It
is this "US-TEC" organization, with its counterpart bilateral agreements
among other nations and the USSR, that has brought about the massive changes of
the former Communist world. These did not go unnoticed. During a speech
delivered in 1991, Giovanni Agnelli, chief executive officer of the Fiat
Company and one of the most powerful men in Europe, if not the world, remarked:
The
fall of the Soviet Union is one of the very few instances in history in which a
world power has been defeated on the battlefield of ideas.
Now,
is this what Nixon, Stans, Shultz, Ash, Rockefeller and others had in mind
during those important decades of the sixties, seventies and eighties. For one
thing, it may be said quiet accurately, that these momentous events marked the
end of the Cold War and have all but shredded the canopy of the nuclear
umbrella over mankind.
The
Cold War was the most expensive war in history. R. Buckminister Fuller wrote in
Grunch of Giants:
We
can very properly call World War I the million dollar war and World War II the
billion dollar war and World War III (Cold War) the trillion dollar war.
The
power structure that kept the Cold War at that level of cost and intensity had
been spearheaded by the Secret Team and its multinational covert operations, to
wit:
This
is the fundamental game of the Secret Team. They have this power because they
control secrecy and secret intelligence and because they have the ability to
take advantage of the most modern communications system in the world, of global
transportation systems, of quantities of weapons of all kinds, and when needed,
the full support of a world-wide U.S. military supporting base structure. They
can use the finest intelligence system in the world, and most importantly, they
have been able to operate under the canopy of an assumed, ever-present enemy
called "Communism." It will be interesting to see what
"enemy" develops in the years ahead. It appears that "UFO's and
Aliens" are being primed to fulfill that role for the future. To top all
of this, there is the fact that the CIA, itself, has assumed the right to
generate and direct secret operations.
--L.
Fletcher Prouty
Alexandria, VA 1997
Alexandria, VA 1997
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
. . . to Len Osanic and all
at Bandit Productions for bringing all my work back to life.
. . . to Patrick Fourmy, Dave Ratcliffe and Tom Davis, old friends who have
insisted I revise and re-write this old "classic".
. . . to Bill Mullan, Charlie Czapar,
Bill Peters, and Dave Fleming, who worked with me in the Pentagon during the
fifties, for those fascinating years with "Team B" in Headquarters,
U.S. Air Force.
. . . to Charles Peters of The Washington Monthly for publishing
the first "Secret Team" article, and Derek Shearer for breathing the
whole concept into life.
. . . to General Graves B. (the big
"E") Erskine and General Victor H. ("Brute") Krulak, both
of the U. S. Marine Corps, my immediate "bosses" and good friends, in
the Office of the Secretary of Defense and in the Office of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, for close personal relationships that shaped the course of these events.
. . . and to the hundreds of men with
whom I shared these experiences and who must remain nameless and silent because
that is the "code" of their chosen profession.
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AUTHOR'S NOTE: 1997
After I had given the manuscript of the original draft of this book to my editor at Prentice-Hall, in 1972; and had received the galley proof of the first edition back from him, he called me to suggest that I keep it in a safe place at all times. He told me that his home had been broken into the night before, and he suspected it was an attempt to steal his copy of that galley proof. He said, "They didn't get it. It was under the seat of the Volkswagon."
A
few days later a nationwide release by the well-known Washington columnist,
Jack Anderson, appeared across the country, "Book Bares CIA's Dirty
Tricks". In that column, Anderson reported that the CIA had contacted a
well-known bookstore in Washington and asked one of the employees to see if he
could get a copy of the galley from me, and agreed to pay him $500, if he did.
I agreed to meet him at my home that evening.
I
suspected his call, but invited him anyway. In the meantime I set up a tape
recorder in the umbrella stand near my front door and arranged for it to turn
on when I switched on the overhead light on the front porch. With that
arrangement, I recorded the whole visit including his final burst, "They
promised me $500.00, if I got that galley proof." I took that tape to Anderson,
and it was the basis of his March 6, 1973 column. The underground attack didn't
quit there.
After
excellent early sales of The Secret Team
during which Prentice-Hall printed three editions of the book, and it had received
more than 100 favorable reviews, I was invited to meet Ian Ballantine, the
founder of Ballantine Books. He told me that he liked the book and would
publish 100,000 copies in paperback as soon as he could complete the deal with
Prentice-Hall. Soon there were 100,000 paperbacks in bookstores all around the
country.
Then
one day a business associate in Seattle called to tell me that the bookstore
next to his office building had had a window full of books the day before, and
none the day of his call. They claimed they had never had the book. I called
other associates around the country. I got the same story from all over the
country. The paperback had vanished. At the same time I learned that Mr.
Ballantine had sold his company. I traveled to New York to visit the new
"Ballantine Books" president. He professed to know nothing about me,
and my book. That was the end of that surge of publication. For some unknown
reason Prentice-Hall was out of my book also. It became an extinct species.
Coincidental
to that, I received a letter from a Member of Parliament in Canberra,
Australia, who wrote that he had been in England recently visiting in the home
of a friend who was a Member of the British Parliament. While there, he
discovered The Secret Team on a
coffee table and during odd hours had begun to read it.
Upon
return to Canberra he sent his clerk to get him a copy of the book. Not finding
it in the stores, the clerk had gone to the Customs Office where he learned
that 3,500 copies of The Secret Team
had arrived, and on that same date had been purchased by a Colonel from the
Royal Australian Army. The book was dead everywhere.
The
campaign to kill the book was nationwide and world-wide. It was removed from
the Library of Congress and from College libraries as letters I received
attested all too frequently.
That
was twenty years ago. Today I have been asked to rewrite the book and bring it
up to date. Those who have the book speak highly of it, and those who do not
have it have been asking for it. With that incentive, I have begun from page
one to bring it up to date and to provide information that I have learned since
my first manuscript.
In
the beginning, this book was based upon my unusual experience in the Pentagon
during 1955-1964 and the concept of the book itself was the outgrowth of a
series of luncheon conversations, 1969-1970, with my friends Bob Myers,
Publisher of the New Republic,
Charlie Peters, founder of The Washington
Monthly, and Ben Schemmer, editor and publisher of the Armed Forces Journal, and Derek Shearer. They were all experienced
in the ways and games played in Washington, and they tagged my stories those of
a "Secret Team." This idea grew and was polished during many
subsequent luncheons.
After
my retirement from the Air Force, 1964, I moved from an office in the Joint
Chiefs of Staff area of the Pentagon to become Manager of the Branch Bank on
the Concourse of that great building. This was an interesting move for many
reasons, not the least of which was that it kept me in business and social
contact with many of the men I had met and worked with during my nine years of
Air Force duties in that building. It kept me up-to-date with the old
"fun-and-games" gang.
After
graduating from the Graduate School of Banking, University of Wisconsin, I
transfered to a bank in Washington where in the course of business I met Ben
Schemmer. He needed a loan that would enable him to acquire the old Armed Forces Journal. During that
business process I met two of Ben's friends Bob Myers and Charlie Peters. We
spent many most enjoyable business luncheons together. This is where "The
Secret Team" emerged from a pattern of ideas to a manuscript.
As
they heard my stories about my work with the CIA, and especially about the role
of the military in support of the world-wide, clandestine operations of the
CIA, they urged me to write about those fascinating nine years of a 23-year
military career. During the Spring of 1970 I put an article together that we
agreed to call "The Secret Team", and Charlie Peters published it in
the May 1970 issue of The Washington
Monthly.
Before
I had seen the published article myself, two editors of major publishers in New
York called me and asked for appointments. I met with both, and agreed to
accept the offer to write a book of the same name, and same concept of The Secret Team from Bram Cavin, Senior
Editor with Prentice-Hall.
After
all but finishing the manuscript, with my inexperienced typing of some 440
pages, I sat down to a Sunday breakfast on June 13, 1971 and saw the headlines
of the New York Times with its
publication of the "purloined" Pentagon
Papers.[1] One of the first excerpts from those papers was a TOP
SECRET document that I had worked on in late 1963. Then I found
more of the same. With that, I knew that I could vastly improve what I had been
writing by making use of that hoard of classified material that "Daniel
Ellsberg had left on the doorstep of the Times,"
and other papers. Up until that time I had deliberately avoided the use of some
of my old records and copies of highly classified documents. The publication of
the Pentagon Papers changed all that.
They were now in the public domain. I decided to call my editor and tell him
what we had with the "Pentagon Papers" and to ask for more time to
re-write my manuscript. He agreed without hesitation. From that time on I began
my "Doctorate" course in, a) book publishing and, b) book
annihilation.
As
we see, by some time in 1975 The Secret
Team was extinct; but unlike the dinosaur and others, it did not even leave
its footprints in the sands of time. There may be some forty to fifty thousand
copies on private book shelves. A letter from a professor informed me that his
department had ordered more than forty of the books to be kept on the shelves
of his university library for assignment purposes. At the start of the new
school year his students reported that the books were not on the shelves and
the registry cards were not in the master file. The librarians informed them
that the book did not exist.
With
that letter in mind, I dropped into the Library of Congress to see if The Secret Team was on the shelves where
I had seen it earlier. It was not, and it was not even in that library's master
file. It is now an official non-book.
I
was a writer whose book had been cancelled by a major publisher and a major
paperback publisher under the persuasive hand of the CIA. Now, after more than
twenty years the flames of censorship still sweep across the land. Despite
that, here we go again with a new revised edition of The Secret Team.
_______
1. Any reader of the "Pentagon
Papers" should be warned that although they were commissioned on June 17,
1967, by the Secretary of Defense as "the history of United States
involvement in Vietnam from World War II [Sept 2, 1945] to the present"
[1968], they are unreliable, inaccurate and marred by serious omissions. They
are a contrived history, at best, even though they were written by a selected
Task Force under Pentagon leadership.
PREFACE
1972
From
President to Ambassador, Cabinet Officer to Commanding General, and from
Senator to executive assistant-all these men have their sources of information
and guidance. Most of this information and guidance is the result of carefully
laid schemes and ploys of pressure groups.In this influential coterie one of
the most interesting and effective roles is that played by the behind the
scenes, faceless, nameless, ubiquitous briefing officer.
He
is the man who sees the President, the Secretary, the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff almost daily, and who carries with him the most skillfully
detailed information. He is trained by years of experience in the precise way
to present that information to assure its effectiveness. He comes away day
after day knowing more and more about the man he has been briefing and about
what it is that the truly influential pressure groups at the center of power
and authority are really trying to tell these key decision makers. In
Washington, where such decisions shape and shake the world, the role of the
regular briefing officer is critical.
Leaders
of government and of the great power centers regularly leak information of all
kinds to columnists, television and radio commentators, and to other media
masters with the hope that the material will surface and thus influence the
President, the Secretary, the Congress, and the public. Those other inside
pressure groups with their own briefing officers have direct access to the top
men; they do not have to rely upon the media, although they make great use of
it. They are safe and assured in the knowledge that they can get to the
decision maker directly. They need no middleman other than the briefing
officer. Such departments as Defense, State, and the CIA use this technique
most effectively.
For
nine consecutive, long years during those crucial days from 1955 through
January 1, 1964, I was one of those briefing officers. I had the unique
assignment of being the "Focal Point" officer for contacts between
the CIA and the Department of Defense on matters pertaining to the military
support of the Special Operations[1] of that Agency. In that capacity I worked with Allen
Dulles and John Foster Dulles, several Secretaries of Defense, and Chairmen of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as many others in key governmental places.
My work took me to more than sixty countries and to CIA offices and covert
activities all over the world--from such hot spots as Saigon and to such remote
places as the South Pole. Yes, there have been secret operations in Antarctica.
It
was my job not only to brief these men, but to brief them from the point of
view of the CIA so that I might win approval of the projects presented and of
the accompanying requests for support from the military in terms of money,
manpower, facilities, and materials. I was, during this time, perhaps the best
informed "Focal Point" officer among the few who operated in this
very special area. The role of the briefing officer is quiet, effective, and
most influential; and, in the CIA, specialized in the high art of top level
indoctrination.
It
cannot be expected that a John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, a Richard Nixon, or a
following President will have experienced and learned all the things that may
arise to confront him during his busy official life in the White House. It
cannot be expected that a Robert McNamara or a Melvin Laird, a Dean Rusk or a
William Rogers, etc. comes fully equipped to high office, aware of all matters
pertaining to what they will encounter in their relationship with the Congo or
Cuba, Vietnam or Pakistan, and China or Russia and the emerging new nations.
These men learn about these places and the many things that face them from day
to day from an endless and unceasing procession of briefing officers.
Henry
Kissinger was a briefing officer. General John Vogt was one of the best.
Desmond Fitzgerald, Tracy Barnes, Ed Lansdale, and "Brute" Krulak, in
their own specialties, were top-flight briefing officers on subjects that until
the publication of the "Pentagon Papers," few people had ever seen in
print or had ever even contemplated.
(You
can imagine my surprise when I read the June 13, 1971, issue of the Sunday New York Times and saw there among the
"Pentagon Papers" a number of basic information papers that had been
in my own files in the Joint Chiefs of Staff area of the Pentagon. Most of the
papers of that period had been source documents from which I had prepared
dozens -- even hundreds -- of briefings, for all kinds of projects, to be given
to top Pentagon officers. Not only had many of those papers been in my files,
but I had either written many of them myself or had written certain of the
source documents used by the men who did.)
The
briefing officer, with the staff officer, writes the basic papers. He
researches the papers. He has been selected because he has the required
knowledge and experience. He has been to the countries and to the places
involved. He may know the principals in the case well. He is supposed to be the
best man available for that special job. In my own case, I had been on many
special assignments dating back to the Cairo and Teheran conferences of late
1943 that first brought together the "Big Four" of the Allied nations
of WW II: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek and Joseph
Stalin.
The
briefing officer reads all of the messages, regardless of classification. He
talks to a number of other highly qualified men. He may even have staff
specialists spread out all over the world upon whom he may call at any time for
information. Working in support of the "Focal Point" office, which I
headed, there were hundreds of experts and agents concealed in military
commands throughout the world who were part of a network I had been directed to
establish in 1955-1956 as a stipulation of National Security Council directive
5412, March 1954.
In
government official writing, the man who really writes the paper--or more
properly, the men whose original work and words are put together to become the
final paper--are rarely, if ever, the men whose names appear on that paper. A
paper attributed to Maxwell Taylor, Robert McNamara or Dean Rusk, of the
Kennedy era, would not, in almost all instances, have been written by them; but
more than likely would have been assembled from information gathered from the Departments
of Defense and State and from CIA sources and put into final language by such a
man as General Victor H. Krulak, who was among the best of that breed of
official writers.
From
l955 through 1963, if some official wanted a briefing on a highly classified
subject involving the CIA, I would be one of those called upon to prepare the
material and to make the briefing. At the same time, if the CIA wanted support
from the Air Force for some covert operation, I was the officer who had been officially
designated to provide this special operational support to the CIA.
If
I was contacted by the CIA to provide support for an operation which I believed
the Secretary of Defense had not been previously informed of, I would see to it
that he got the necessary briefing from the CIA or from my office and that any
other Chief of Staff who might be involved would get a similar briefing. In
this unusual business I found rather frequently that the CIA would be well on
its way into some operation that would later require military support before
the Secretary and the Chiefs had been informed.
During
preparations for one of the most important of these operations, covered in some
detail in this book, I recall briefing the chairman of the Joint Chief's of
Staff, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, on the subject of the largest clandestine
special operation that the CIA had ever mounted up to that time: and then
hearing him say to the other Chiefs, "I just can't believe it. I never
knew that."
Here
was the nation's highest ranking military officer, the man who would be held
responsible for the operation should it fail or become compromised, and he had
not been told enough about it to know just how it was being handled. Such is
the nature of the game as played by the "Secret Team."
I
have written for several magazines on this subject, among them the Armed Forces Journal, The New Republic, the Empire Magazine of the Denver Sunday Post, and The Washington Monthly. It was for this latter publication that I
wrote "The Secret Team", an article that appeared in the May 1970
issue and that led to the development of this book.
With
the publication of the "Pentagon Papers" on June 13,1971, interest in
this subject area was heightened and served to underscore my conviction that
the scope of that article must be broadened into a book.
Within
days of The New York Times
publication of those "Pentagon Papers," certain editorial personnel
with the BBC-TV program, "Twenty-Four Hours", recalling my
"Secret Team" article, invited me to appear on a series on TV with,
among others, Daniel Ellsberg. They felt that my experience with the Secret
Team would provide material for an excellent companion piece to the newly released
"Pentagon Papers," which were to be the primary topic of the
discussions. I flew to London and made a number of programs for BBC-TV and
Radio. Legal problems and the possible consequences of his departure from the
country at that time precluded the simultaneous appearance of Daniel Ellsberg.
The programs got wide reception and served to underscore how important the
subject of the "Pentagon Papers" is throughout the world.
I
have not chosen to reveal and to expose "unreleased" classified
documents; but I do believe that those that have been revealed, both in the
"Pentagon Papers" and elsewhere, need to be interpreted and fully
explained. I am interested in setting forth and explaining what
"secrecy" and the "cult of containment" really mean and
what they have done to our way of life and to our country. Furthermore, I want
to correct any disinformation that may have been given by those who have tried
to write on these subjects in other related histories.
I
have lived this type of work; I know what happened and how it happened. I have
known countless men who participated in one way or another in these unusual
events of Twentieth Century history. Many of these men have been and still are
members of the Secret Team. It also explains why much of it has been pure
propaganda and close to nationwide "brainwashing" of the American
public. I intend to interpret and clarify these events by analyzing information
already in the public domain. There is plenty.
Few
concepts during this half century have been as important, as controversial, as
misunderstood, and as misinterpreted as secrecy in Government. No idea during
this period has had a greater impact upon Americans and upon the American way
of life than that of the containment of Communism. Both are inseparably
intertwined and have nurtured each other in a blind Pavlovian way.
Understanding their relationship is a matter of fundamental importance.
Much
has been written on these subjects and on their vast supporting infrastructure,
generally known as the "intelligence community." Some of this
historical writing has suffered from a serious lack of inside knowledge and
experience. Most of this writing has been done by men who know something about
the subject, by men who have researched and learned something about the
subject, and in a few cases by men who had some experience with the subject.
Rarely is there enough factual experience on the part of the writer. On the
other hand, the Government and other special interests have paid writers huge amounts
to write about this subject as they want it done, not truthfully. Thus our
history is seriously warped and biased by such work.
Many
people have been so concerned about what has been happening to our Government
that they have dedicated themselves to investigating and exposing its evils.
Unfortunately, a number of these writers have been dupes of those cleverer than
they or with sinister reasons for concealing knowledge. They have written what
they thought was the truth, only to find out (if they ever did find out) that
they had been fed a lot of contrived cover stories and just plain hogwash. In
this book I have taken extracts from some of this writing and, line by line,
have shown how it has been manipulated to give a semblance of truth while at
the same time being contrived and false.
Nevertheless,
there have been some excellent books in this broad area. But many of these
books suffer from various effects of the dread disease of secrecy and from its
equally severe corollary illness called "cover" (the CIA's official
euphemism for not telling the truth).
The
man who has not lived in the secrecy and intelligence environment--really lived
in it and fully experienced it--cannot write accurately about it. There is no
substitute for the day to day living of a life in which he tells his best
friends and acquaintances, his family and his everyday contacts one story while
he lives another. The man who must depend upon research and investigation
inevitably falls victim to the many pitfalls of the secret world and of the
"cover story" world with its lies and counter-lies.
A
good example of this is the work of Les Gelb and his Pentagon associates on the
official version of the purloined "Pentagon Papers." That very title
is the biggest cover story (no pun intended) of them all; so very few of those
papers were really of Pentagon origin. The fact that I had many of them in my
office of Special Operations in Joint Staff area, and that most of them had
been in the files of the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for
International Security Affairs did not validate the locale of their origin.
They were "working copies" and not originals. Notice how few were
signed by true military officers.
It
is significant to note that the historical record that has been called the
"Pentagon Papers" was actually a formal government-funded "study
of the history of United States involvement in Vietnam from World War II to the
present" i.e. 1945 to 1968. On June 17, 1967 the Secretary of Defense,
Robert S. McNamara directed that work. A task force consisting of "six
times six professionals" under the direction of Leslie H. Gelb produced
"37 studies and 15 collections of documents in 43 volumes" that were
presented on January 15, 1969 to the then-Secretary of Defense, Clark M.
Clifford by Mr. Gelb with the words from Herman Melville's Moby Dick:
"This
is a world of chance, free will, and necessity-all interweavingly working
together as one: chance by turn rules either and had the last featuring blow at
events."
As
you may recall, this treasure trove of TOP SECRET papers was delivered to the New York Times, and other newspapers in
mid-June, 1971, by a then-unknown "Hippie" of that period. His name
was Daniel Ellsberg. What few people have learned since that time is the fact
that both Daniel Ellsberg, who pirated these highly classified papers, and
Leslie Gelb the Director of that Task Force, had worked in that same office of
International Security Affairs (ISA).
The
"misappropriation" of those documents was not the work of some
"true patriots" as Noam Chomsky wrote in 1972. Rather it was an
inside job. That ISA office had been the home of many of the "big
names" of the Vietnam War period, among them Paul H. Nitze, John T.
McNaughton, Paul C. Warnke and William Bundy, among others. The fact that I had
many of them in my office, that I had worked with them, and that I had written
parts of some of them proves that they were not genuine Pentagon papers,
because my work at that time was devoted to support of the CIA. The same is
true of General Krulak, William Bundy, and to a degree, Maxwell Taylor among
others.
To
look at this matter in another way, the man who has lived and experienced this
unnatural existence becomes even more a victim of its unreality. He becomes
enmeshed beyond all control upon the horns of a cruel dilemma. On the one hand,
his whole working life has been dedicated to the cause of secrecy and to its
protection by means of cover stories (lies). In this pursuit he has given of
himself time after time to pledges, briefings, oaths, and deep personal
conviction regarding the significance of that work. Even if he would talk and
write, his life has been so interwoven into the fabric of the real and the
unreal, the actual and the cover story, that he would be least likely to
present the absolutely correct data.
On
the other hand, as a professional he would have been subjected to such
cellurization and compartmentalization each time he became involved in any real
"deep" operation that he would not have known the whole story anyhow.
This compartalization is very real. I have worked on projects with many CIA men
so unaware of the entire operation that they had no realization and awareness
of the roles of other CIA men working on the same project.
I
would know of this because inevitably somewhere along the line both groups
would come to the Department of Defense for hardware support. I actually
designed a special office in the Pentagon with but one door off the corridor.
Inside, it had a single room with one secretary. However, off her office there
was one more door that led to two more offices with a third doorway leading to
yet another office, which was concealed by the door from the secretary's room.
I had to do this because at times we had CIA groups with us who were now
allowed to meet each other, and who most certainly would not have been there
had they known that the others were there. (For the record, the office was
4D1000--it may have been changed by now; but it had remained that way for many
years.)
Another
group of writers, about the world of secrecy, are the "masters"--men
like Allen W. Dulles, Lyman Kirkpatrick, Peer de Silva and Chester Cooper. My
own choice of the best of these are Peer de Silva and Lyman Kirkpatrick. These
are thoroughly professional intelligence officers who have chosen a career of
high-level intelligence operations. Their writing is correct and
informative--to a degree beyond that which most readers will be able to
translate and comprehend at first reading; yet they are properly circumspect
and guarded and very cleverly protective of their profession.
There
is another category of writer and self-proclaimed authority on the subjects of
secrecy, intelligence, and containment. This man is the suave, professional
parasite who gains a reputation as a real reporter by disseminating the scraps
and "Golden Apples" thrown to him by the great men who use him. This
writer seldom knows and rarely cares that many of the scraps from which he
draws his material have been planted, that they are controlled leaks, and that
he is being used, and glorified as he is being used, by the inside secret
intelligence community.
Allen
Dulles had a penchant for cultivating a number of such writers with big names
and inviting them to his table for a medieval style luncheon in that great room
across the hall from his own offices in the old CIA headquarters on the hill
overlooking Foggy Bottom. Here, he would discuss openly and all too freely the
same subjects that only hours before had been carefully discussed in the secret
inner chambers of the operational side of that quiet Agency. In the hands of
Allen Dulles, "secrecy" was simply a chameleon device to be used as
he saw fit and to be applied to lesser men according to his schemes. It is
quite fantastic to find people like Daniel Ellsberg being charged with leaking
official secrets simply because the label on the piece of paper said "TOP
SECRET," when the substance of many of the words written on those same
papers was patently untrue and no more than a cover story. Except for the fact
that they were official "lies",
these papers had no basis in fact, and therefore no basis to be graded TOP
SECRET or any other degree of classification. Allen Dulles would tell similar
cover stories to his coterie of writers, and not long thereafter they would
appear in print in some of the most prestigious papers and magazines in the
country, totally unclassified, and of course, cleverly untrue.
Lastly
there is the writer from outside this country who has gained his inside
information from sources in another country. These sources are no doubt
reliable; they know exactly what has taken place -- as in Guatemala during the
Bay of Pigs era -- and they can speak with some freedom. In other cases, the
best of these sources have been from behind the Iron Curtain.
In
every case, the chance for complete information is very small, and the hope
that in time researchers, students, and historians will be able to ferret out
truth from untruth, real from unreal, and story from cover story is at best a
very slim one. Certainly, history teaches us that one truth will add to and
enhance another; but let us not forget that one lie added to another lie will
demolish everything. This is the important point.
Consider
the past half century. How many major events--really major events--have there
been that simply do not ring true? How many times has the entire world been
shaken by alarms of major significance, only to find that the events either did
not happen at all, or if they did, that they had happened in a manner quite
unlike the original story? The war in Vietnam is undoubtedly the best example
of this. Why is it that after more than thirty years of clandestine and overt
involvement in Indochina, no one had been able to make a logical case for what
we had been doing there and to explain adequately why we had become involved;
and what our real and valid objectives in that part of the world were?
The
mystery behind all of this lies in the area we know as "Clandestine
activity", "intelligence operations", "secrecy", and
"cover stories", used on a national and international scale. It is
the object of this book to bring reality and understanding into this vast
unknown area.
L.
FLETCHER PROUTY
Colonel, U.S. Air Force (Ret'd)
Colonel, U.S. Air Force (Ret'd)
_______
1. Special Operations is a name given in
most cases, but not always, to any clandestine, covert, undercover, or secret
operations by the government or by someone, U.S. citizen or a foreign national
. . . even in special cases a stateless professional, or U.S. or foreign
activity or organization. It is usually secret and highly classified. It is to
be differentiated from Secret intelligence and in a very parochial sense from
Secret or Special Intelligence Operations.
PREFACE
TO THE SECOND EDITION
Like
it or not, we now live in a new age of "One World." This is the age
of global companies, of global communications and transport, of global food
supply and finance and...just around the corner...global accommodation of
political systems. In this sense, there are no home markets, no isolated
markets and no markets outside the global network. It is time to face the fact
that true national sovereignty no longer exists. We live in a world of big
business, big lawyers, big bankers, even bigger moneymen and big politicians.
It is the world of "The Secret Team."
In
such a world, the Secret Team is a dominant power. It is neither military nor
police. It is covert, and the best (or worst) of both. It gets the job done
whether it has political authorization and direction, or not. It is
independent. It is lawless.
This
book is about the real CIA and its allies around the world. It is based upon
personal experience generally derived from work in the Pentagon from 1955 to
1964. At retirement, I was Chief of Special Operations (clandestine activities)
with the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. These duties involved the military support
of the clandestine activities of the CIA and were performed under the
provisions of National Security Council Directive No. 5412/2.
Since
this book was first published in 1973, we have witnessed the unauthorized
release of the "Pentagon Papers," "Watergate" and the
resignation of President Nixon, the run-away activities of the "Vietnam
War", the "Arab Oil Embargo" that led to the greatest financial
heist in history, and the blatantly unlawful "Iran-Contra" affair.
All of these were brought about and master-minded by a renegade "Secret
Team" that operated secretly, without Presidential direction; without
National Security Council approval -- so they say; and, generally, without
Congressional knowledge. This trend increases. Its scope expands...even today.
I
was the first author to point out that the CIA's most important "Cover
Story is that of an "Intelligence" agency. Of course the CIA does
make use of "intelligence" and "intelligence gathering",
but that is largely a front for its primary interest, "Fun and
Games." The CIA is the center of a vast mechanism that specializes in
Covert Operations...or as Allen Dulles used to call it, "Peacetime
Operations". In this sense, the CIA is the willing tool of a higher level
Secret Team, or High Cabal, that usually includes representatives of the CIA
and other instrumentalities of the government, certain cells of the business
and professional world and, almost always, foreign participation. It is this
Secret Team, its allies, and its method of operation that are the principal
subjects of this book.
It
must be made clear that at the heart of Covert Operations is the denial by the
"operator," i.e. the U.S. Government, of the existence of national
sovereignty. The Covert operator can, and does, make the world his
playground...including the U.S.A.
Today,
early 1990, the most important events of this century are taking place with the
ending of the "Cold War" era, and the beginning of the new age of
"One World" under the control of businessmen and their lawyers,
rather than the threat of military power. This scenario for change has been
brought about by a series of Secret Team operations skillfully orchestrated
while the contrived hostilities of the Cold War were at their zenith.
Chief
among these, yet quite unnoticed, President Nixon and his Secretary of the
Treasury, George Schultz, established a Russian/American organization called
the "USA-USSR Trade and Economic Council," in 1972. Its objective was
to bring about a union of the Fortune 500 Chief Executive Officers of this
country, among others, such as the hierarchy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,
with their counterparts in the Soviet Union. This important relationship,
sponsored by David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank and his associates,
continued through the Carter years. The bilateral activity increased
significantly during the Reagan/Shultz years of the Eighties despite such
"Evil Empire" tantrums as the Korean Airlines Boeing 747 Flight 007
"shootdown" in 1983.
It
is this "US-TEC" organization, with its counterpart bilateral
agreements among other nations and the USSR, that has brought about the massive
Communist world changes.
The
Cold War has been the most expensive war in history. R. Buckminister Fuller has
written in Grunch of Giants:
We
can very properly call World War I the million dollar war and World War II the
billion dollar war and World War III (Cold War) the trillion dollar war.
The
power structure that kept the Cold War at that level of intensity has been
driven by the Secret Team and its multinational covert operations, to wit:
This
is the fundamental game of the Secret Team. They have this power because they
control secrecy and secret intelligence and because they have the ability to
take advantage of the most modern communications system in the world, of global
transportation systems, of quantities of weapons of all kinds, of a world-wide
U.S. military supporting base structure. They can use the finest intelligence
system in the world, and most importantly, they are able to operate under the
canopy of an ever-present "enemy" called "Communism". And
then, to top all of this, there is the fact that the CIA has assumed the right
to generate and direct secret operations.
--L.
Fletcher Prouty
Alexandria, VA 1990
Alexandria, VA 1990
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PREFACE: "THE SECRET TEAM II" 1997
Like
it or not, we now live in the age of "One World". This is the age of
global companies, of global communications and transport, of global food supply
and finance and ... just around the corner ... global accommodation of
political systems. In this sense, there are no home markets, no isolated
markets and no markets outside the global network.
It
is time to face the fact that true national sovereignty no longer exists. We
live in a world of big business, big lawyers, big bankers, even bigger
money-men and big politicians. It is the world of "The Secret Team"
and its masters. We are now, despite common mythology to the contrary, the most
dependent society that has ever lived, and the future of the viability of that
infrastructure of that society is unpredictable. It is crumbling.
As
one of the greatest historians of all time, Ibn Khaldun, wrote in his unequaled
historical work The Muqaddimah of the
14th Century:
God created and fashioned man in a form
that can live and subsist only with the help of food ... Through cooperation,
the needs of a number of persons, many times greater than their own number, can
be satisfied.
As
this One World infrastructure emerges it increases the percentage of our total
dependence upon remote food production capacity to the mass production
capability and transport means of enormous companies operating under the global
policy guidance of such organizations as the Chartered Institute of Transport
in London, and the international banking community. As individuals, few of us
would have any idea where to get a loaf of bread or yard of fabric other than
in some supermarket and department store ... and we are all dependent upon some
form of efficient transport, electric power, gasoline at the pump, and
boundless manufacturing capacity and versatility. Let that system collapse, at
any point, and all of us will be helpless. A cooperating, working system is
essential to survival; yet over-all it is a system without leadership and
guidance.
At
the same time the traditional family farm, and even community farms and
industries, have all but vanished from the scene. This has created, at least in
what we label, the advanced nations, a dearth of farmers and of people who have
that basic experience along with that required in the food and home products
industries. Furthermore, as this trend is amplified, the transport of farm
produce has become increasingly assigned to the trucking industry, which has
its over-land limits ... mostly as applied to the tonnage limits of rural
bridges, and the economical availability of petroleum.
As
a result, something as simple as a trucking industry strike that keeps trucks
out of any city for seventy- two hours or more, will lead to starvation and
food riots. None of us know where to get food, if it is not in the nearby
supermarket; and if we do have a stored supply of food locked in the cellar, we
shall simply be the targets of those who do not. Food is the ultimate driving
force. Under such predictable conditions, there will be waves of slaughter and
eventually cannibalism. Man must eat, and the only way he can obtain adequate
food supplies is through cooperation and the means to transport and distribute
food and other basic necessities. This essential role is being diminished
beyond the borderline. The lack of food supplies has already resulted in a form
of covert genocide in many countries. Other essential shortages unavoidably
follow.
As
Rudyard Kipling has said: "Transport is Civilization." The opposite
is equally true, "Without reliable transport we are reduced to the state
of barbarism."
These
are fundamental statements of fact. In such a world, the Secret Team is the
functional element of the dominant power. It is the point of the spear and is
neither military nor police. It is covert: and the best (or worst) of both. It
gets the job done whether it has political authorization and direction, or not.
In this capacity, it acts independently. It is lawless. It operates everywhere
with the best of all supporting facilities from special weaponry and advanced
communications, with the assurance that its members will never be prosecuted.
It is subservient to the Power Elite and protected by them. The Power Elite or
High Cabal need not be Royalty in these days. They are their equals or better.
Note
with care, it is labeled a "Team". This is because as with any highly
professional team it has its managers, its front office and its owners. These
are the "Power Elite" to whom it is beholden. They are always
anonymous, and their network is ancient and world-wide. Let us draw an example
from recent history.
During
the Senate Hearings of 1975 on "Alleged Assassination Ploys Involving
Foreign Leaders," Senator Charles C. Mathias' thoughts went back to
November 22, 1963 and to the coup d'etat brought about by the surgical
precision of the death of President John F. Kennedy, when he said:
Let
me draw an example from history. When Thomas Becket (Saint Thomas Becket,
1118-1170) was proving to be an annoyance, as Castro; the King said "Who
will rid me of this man?" He didn't say to somebody, go out and murder
him. He said who will rid me of this man, and let it go at that. (As you will
recall, Thomas Becket's threat was not against the King, it was against the way
the King wanted to run the government.)
With
no explicit orders, and with no more authority than that, four of King Henry's
knights, found and killed "this man", Saint Thomas Becket inside of
his church. That simple statement ... no more than a wish floating in air ...
proved to be all the orders needed.
Then,
with that great historical event in mind, Senator Mathias went on to say:
... that is typical of the kind of
thing which might be said, which might be taken by the Director of Central
Intelligence or by anybody else, as Presidential authorization to go forward
... you felt that some spark had been transmitted ...
To
this Senator Jesse Helms added:
Yes, and if he had disappeared from the
scene they would not have been unhappy.
There's
the point! Because the structure, a "Power Elite", "High
Cabal" or similar ultimate ruling organization, exists and the
psychological atmosphere has been prepared, nothing more has to be said than
that which ignites that "spark" of an assumed "authorization to
go forward." Very often, this is the way in which the Secret Team gets its
orders ... they are no more than "a wish floating in air."
This
book is about a major element of this real power structure of the world and of
its impact upon the CIA and its allies around the world. It is based upon much
personal experience generally derived from my military service from mid-1941 to
1964: U.S. Army Cavalry, U.S. Army Armored Force, U.S. Army Air Corps and Army
Air Force, and finally the U. S. Air Force; and more specifically from my
special assignments in the Pentagon from 1955 to 1964. At retirement, I was the
first Chief of Special Operations with the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. All of
these duties, during those Pentagon years, were structured to provide "the
military support of the world-wide clandestine activities of the CIA."
They were performed in accordance with the provisions of an Eisenhower era,
National Security Council Directive No. 5412/2, March 15, 1954.
Since
this book was first published in 1973, we have witnessed the unauthorized
release of the Defense Department's official " history of United States
involvement in Vietnam from World War II to 1969" popularly known as the
"Pentagon Papers," "Watergate" and the resignation of
President Nixon, the run away activities of the "Vietnam War," the
"Arab Oil Embargo" that led to the greatest financial heist in
history, the blatantly unlawful "Iran Contra" affair, and the
run-away banking scandals of the eighties. Many of these were brought about and
master minded by renegade "Secret Team" members who operated, without
Presidential direction; without National Security Council approval so they say;
and, generally, without official Congressional knowledge. This trend increases.
Its scope expands ... even today.
I
pointed out, years ago in public pronouncements, that the ClA's most important
"Cover Story" is that of an "intelligence" agency. Of
course the CIA does make use of "intelligence" and its assumed role
of "intelligence gathering," but that is largely a front for its
primary interest, "Fun and Games" ... as the "Old Boys" or
"Jedburgh's" of the WW II period Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
called it.
The
CIA is the center of a vast, and amorphous mechanism that specializes in Covert
Operations ... or as Allen Dulles always called it,"Peacetime Operations."
In this sense, the CIA is the willing tool of a higher level High Cabal, that
may include representatives and highly skilled agents of the CIA and other
instrumentality's of the government, certain cells of the business and
professional world and, almost always, foreign participation. It is this
ultimate Secret Team, its allies, and its method of operation that are the
principal subject of this book.
It
must be made clear that at the heart of Covert Operations is the denial by the
"operator," i.e. the U.S. Government, of the existence of national
sovereignty. The covert operator can, and does, make the world his playground
... including the U.S.A.
Today,
in the mid-1990's, the most important events of this century are taking place
with the ending of the "Cold War" era, and the beginning of the new
age of "One World" under the control of businessmen and their
lawyers, rather than under the threat of military power and ideological
differences. This scenario for change has been brought about by a series of
Secret Team operations skillfully orchestrated while the contrived hostilities
of the Cold War were at their zenith.
Two
important events of that period have been little noted. First, on Feb. 7, 1972
Maurice Stans, Nixon's Secretary of Commerce opened a "White House
Conference on the Industrial World Ahead, A Look at Business in 1990."
This three-day meeting of more than fifteen hundred of the country's leading
businessmen, scholars, and the like were concluded with this memorable summary
statement by Roy L. Ash, president of Litton Industries:
... state capitalism may well be a form
for world business in the world ahead; that the western countries are trending
toward a more unified and controlled economy, having a greater effect on all
business; and the communist nations are moving more and more toward a free
market system. The question posed during this conference on which a number of
divergent opinions arose, was whether 'East and West' would meet some place
toward the middle about 1990.
That
was an astounding forecast as we consider events of the seventies and eighties
and discover that his forecast, if it ever was a forecast and not a pre-planned
arrangement, was right on the nose.
This
amazing forecast had its antecedent pronouncements, among which was another
"One World" speech by this same Roy Ash during the Proceedings of the
American Bankers Association National Automation Conference in New York City,
May 8,9,10, 1967.
The
affairs of the world are becoming inextricably interlinked ... governments,
notably, cannot effectively perform the task of creating and distributing food
and other essential products and services ... economic development is the
special capability and function of business and industrial organizations ...
business organizations are the most efficient converters of the original
resources of the world into useable goods and services.
The
flash of genius, the new ideas, always comes from the marvelous workings of the
individual brain, not from the committee sessions. Organizations are to
implement ideas, not to have them.
As
a Charter Member of the American Bankers Association's Committee on Automation
Planning and Technology I was a panelist at that same convention as we worked
to convert the 14,000 banks of this country to automation and the ubiquitous
Credit Card. All of these subjects were signs of the times leading toward the
demise of the Soviet Union in favor of an evolutionary process toward One
World.
In
addition to the 1972 White House Conference on the Industrial World Ahead a
most significant yet quite unnoticed action took place during that same year
when President Nixon and his then-Secretary of the Treasury, George Shultz,
established a Russian/American organization called the "USA USSR Trade and
Economic Council." Its objective was to bring about a union of the Fortune
500 Chief Executive Officers of this country, among others, such as the
hierarchy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with their counterparts in the
Soviet Union. This important relationship, sponsored by David Rockefeller of
Chase Manhattan Bank and his associates, continues into the "One
World" years.
This
bilateral activity increased during the Reagan/Shultz years of the Eighties
despite such "Evil Empire" staged tantrums as the Korean Airlines
Boeing 747 Flight 007 "shootdown" in 1983.
It
is this "US-TEC" organization, with its counterpart bilateral agreements
among other nations and the USSR, that has brought about the massive changes of
the former Communist world. These did not go unnoticed. During a speech
delivered in 1991, Giovanni Agnelli, chief executive officer of the Fiat
Company and one of the most powerful men in Europe, if not the world, remarked:
The
fall of the Soviet Union is one of the very few instances in history in which a
world power has been defeated on the battlefield of ideas.
Now,
is this what Nixon, Stans, Shultz, Ash, Rockefeller and others had in mind
during those important decades of the sixties, seventies and eighties. For one
thing, it may be said quiet accurately, that these momentous events marked the
end of the Cold War and have all but shredded the canopy of the nuclear
umbrella over mankind.
The
Cold War was the most expensive war in history. R. Buckminister Fuller wrote in
Grunch of Giants:
We
can very properly call World War I the million dollar war and World War II the
billion dollar war and World War III (Cold War) the trillion dollar war.
The
power structure that kept the Cold War at that level of cost and intensity had
been spearheaded by the Secret Team and its multinational covert operations, to
wit:
This
is the fundamental game of the Secret Team. They have this power because they
control secrecy and secret intelligence and because they have the ability to
take advantage of the most modern communications system in the world, of global
transportation systems, of quantities of weapons of all kinds, and when needed,
the full support of a world-wide U.S. military supporting base structure. They
can use the finest intelligence system in the world, and most importantly, they
have been able to operate under the canopy of an assumed, ever-present enemy
called "Communism." It will be interesting to see what
"enemy" develops in the years ahead. It appears that "UFO's and
Aliens" are being primed to fulfill that role for the future. To top all
of this, there is the fact that the CIA, itself, has assumed the right to
generate and direct secret operations.
--L.
Fletcher Prouty
Alexandria, VA 1997
Alexandria, VA 1997
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