the following appeared in the 7/75 issue of Genesis: How the CIA Controls
President Ford
By L. Fletcher Prouty
reprinted with permission of the author
In this monstrous U.S. government today, it's not so much what comes down
from the top that matters as what you can get away with from the bottom or
from the middle -- the least scrutinized level. (Contrary to the current CIA
propaganda as preached by William Colby, Ray Cline, Victor Marchetti and
Philip Agee, who say, incorrectly, "What the Agency does is ordered by the
President.") As with the Mafia, crime is a cinch if you know the cops and the
courts have been paid off. With the Central Intelligence Agency, anything
goes when you have a respected boss to sanctify and bless your activities and
to shield them from outside eyes. Such a boss in the CIA was old Allen
Dulles, who ran the Agency like a mother superior running a whorehouse. He
knew the girls were happy, busy, and well fed, but he wasn't quite sure what
they were doing. His favorites, all through the years of his prime as
Director of Central Intelligence, were such stellar performers as Frank
Wisner, Dick Bissell, George Doole, Sheffield Edwards, Dick Helms, Red White,
Tracy Barnes, Desmond Fitzgerald, Joe Alsop, Ted Shannon, Ed Lansdale and
countless others. They were the great operators. He just made it possible for
them to do anything they came up with. When Wisner and Richard Nixon came up
with the idea of mounting a major rebellion in Indonesia in 1958, Dulles saw
that they got the means and the wherewithal. When General Cabell and his Air
Force friends plugged the U-2 project for Kelly Johnson of Lockheed, Dulles
tossed it into the lap of Dick Bissell. When Dick Helms and Des Fitzgerald
figured they could play fun and games in Tibet, Dulles talked to Tom Gates,
then Secretary of Defense, and the next we knew CIA agents were spiriting the
Dalai Lama out of Lhasa, CIA undercover aircraft were clandestinely dropping
tons of arms, ammunitions, and supplies deep into Tibet and other planes were
reaching as far as northwestern China to Koko Nor. While he peddled the
hard-won National Intelligence Estimates to all top offices and sprinkled
holy water over the pates of our leaders, Dulles dropped off minor miracles
along the way to titillate those in high places. If you win the heart of the
queen and convert her to your faith, you can control the king. This works for
the Jesuits. It worked well for the CIA. Allen Dulles was no casual student
and practitioner of the ancient art of religion. He was an expert in the art
of mind-control. He learned how to operate his disciples and his Agency in
the ways of the cloth. But for every Saint and every Sinner in the fold there
must be an order of monks, and the Agency has always been the haven for
hundreds of faceless, nameless minions whose only satisfaction was the job
well done and the furtherance of the cause. One of the most remarkable -- and
surely the best -- of these was an agent named Frank Hand. In my book, The
Secret Team, written during 1971 and 1972, I mentioned that the most
important agent in the CIA was an almost unknown individual who spent most of
his time in the Pentagon. At that time I did not reveal his name; but a small
item in a recent obituary column stated that:
"Frank Hand, 61, a former senior official of the CIA, died in Marshall,
Minn. . . . (he was) a graduate of Harvard Law School. He had served with
the CIA from 1950 until retirement in 1971."
After a life devoted to quiet, effective, skillful performance of one of the
most important jobs in the worldwide structure of that unparalleled agency,
all that the CIA would publicly say of Frank Hand was that he was a "senior
official."
Ask Dick Helms, Ed Lansdale, Bob McNamara, Tom Gates or Allen Dulles or John
Foster Dulles, if they were with us today, and they all would tell us stories
about Frank Hand. They would do more to characterize the nature and the
sources of power which make use of and control the CIA than has ever been
told before. He was that superior operative who made big things work
unobtrusively.
You might have been one of the grass-green McNamara "whiz kids," lost in the
maze of the Pentagon Puzzle Palace, who came upon a short, Hobbit-like,
pleasant man who knew the Pentagon so well that you got the feeling he was
brought in with the original load of concrete. Thousands of career men to
this day will never realize that Frank Hand was a "Senior Official" of the
CIA and not one of their civilian cohorts. To my knowledge he never worked
anywhere else. I was there in 1955 and he was there. I left in December 1963,
and he was at my farewell party. He must have spent some of his time at the
agency; but it must have been before 1955. If he had a dollar for every trip
he made in those busy years between the Pentagon and the CIA he would have
died a very wealthy man. He popularized the Agency term "across the river"
and the "Acme Plumbers" nickname for agents of the CIA. (A term later to be
confused by Colson and John Ehrlichman, among others, with the use of the
term "White House Plumbers" of Watergate fame. Someone knew that Hunt,
McCord, the Cubans, Haig, Butterfield and others all had CIA backgrounds and
connections and therefore were "Plumbers." Only the insiders knew about the
real "Acme Plumbers.")
Frank was as much at home with Allen Dulles as he was with the famous old
supersleuth, General Graves B. Erskine, and as he was with Helms, Colby, or
Fitzgerald. Ian Fleming may have popularized the spy and the undercover agent
as a flashing James Bond type; but in the reality of today's world the great
ones are more in the mold of Frank Hand and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.
There has long existed a "golden key" group of agency and agency-related
supermen. They came from the CIA, the Pentagon, the Department of State, the
White House and other places in government or from the outside. They have
kept themselves inconspicuous and they meet in the evening away from their
offices. They are the men who open the doors of big government to
industry-banking law and to the multinational corporate centers of greed and
power. Their strength lies in their common awareness of the ways in which
real power is generated in the government, the real power that controls
activities of the government. In many instances this is the power of being
able to keep something from happening, rather than to make it happen. For
example, if the President is murdered, real power involves the control of
government operations sufficient to make any investigation ineffective and to
assure that the government will do nothing even if the investigation should
turn up something. Real power is the ability to keep the government
bureaucracy from going into action when the price of petroleum and wheat is
doubled or tripled by avaricious international monopolies.
Some of these "gold key" members have surfaced and have accepted publicity,
as did Des Fitzgerald, Allen Dulles, Tracy Barnes and others. Frank never
did. He was so anonymous that even his friends could not find him.
The Agency covered for Frank Hand as it did for few others. The James Bonds
of this world may be the idols of the Intelligence coterie; but if you are a
Bill Colby, Dick Helms, or Allen Dulles, you know the real value of an
indispensable agent. Frank was their man in the Pentagon, and the Pentagon
was always the indispensable prime target of the CIA. When the chips are
down, the CIA could care less about overturning "Communism" in Cuba or Chile.
What really matters is its relative power in the U.S. Government. Control of
a good share of what the Pentagon is doing is more important to the CIA than
control over the government of Jordan or Syria.
Once, when the CIA wanted to move a squadron (twenty-five) of helicopters
from Laos to South Vietnam, long before the troubles there had become a war,
I turned down the request from the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence in
the name of the Secretary of Defense for no other reason than the fact that I
did not find that project on the approved list of the National Security
Council's "Forty Committee" (then called the 5412/2 committee). That meant
the agency had neither been directed by the National Security Council to move
those helicopters into Vietnam, nor had it received authorization for such a
tactical movement. In other words, the planned intervention into South
Vietnam with a squadron of helicopters would at that time have been unlawful
as an intervention into the internal affairs of another country.
This denial then, in 1960, effectively blocked the CIA from being able to
move heavy war-making equipment into Vietnam. The helicopters were actually
U.S. Marine Corps property on "loan" from Okinawa to the CIA for clandestine
operations in Laos.
At that time my immediate superior was General Graves Erskine, the Assistant
to the Secretary of Defense for Special (Clandestine) Operations, and the man
then responsible for all military support of clandestine operations of the
CIA. Also at that time, Frank Hand, "worked for" Erskine. Of course, this was
a cover assignment -- "cover slot" as it was known to us and to the CIA.
Frank had a regular office in the Pentagon.
No sooner had the CIA request been turned down than someone near the top of
the agency called Frank and told him about it. In his smiling and friendly
way he came into my office, carrying two cups of coffee, and began some talk
about music, travel, or golf. Then, as was his practice, he would get the
subject around to his point with such a comment as, "Fletch, who do you
suppose took a call here about the choppers in Laos?" and we would be off.
The special ability he possessed was best evidenced by the process he would
set in motion once he discovered a problem that affected the ambitions of the
agency. He would talk about the choppers with Erskine. Then he would drop in
to see the Chief of Naval Operations and perhaps the Commandant of the Marine
Corps. He would talk with some of the other civilian Assistant Secretaries.
In other words, he would go from office to office like a bee spreading
pollen, titillating only the most senior officers and civilian officials with
the most "highly sensitive" tidbits about the CIA's plans for Vietnam. In
this manner he would find out what the real thinking in the Pentagon might
be, and where there might be real opposition to such an idea -- such as in
the Marine Corps, which knew it would never get compensation for those
expensive helicopters and for the loss of time of all their support people.
He would also find out where there would be support, as with the ever-eager
U.S. Army Special Forces, most of whose senior officers had been with the
CIA.
Then he would drop out of the picture for awhile to travel back to the old
CIA headquarters, on the hill that overlooks what is now the Watergate
complex, for a long talk with Allen Dulles or the Deputy Director, General
Cabell. On matters involving the clandestine services he would also stop by
the old headquarters buildings, that lined the reflecting pool near the
Lincoln Memorial, to talk with Dick Helms, Desmond Fitzgerald, and other
operators. Within a day or two he would have them fully briefed on the steps
to be taken in order to win over the Defense Department; or failing that, how
to overpower and outmaneuver the Pentagon in the Department of State and the
White House.
The foregoing is a "case study" on the important subject of how the CIA
really operates and what it believes is its top priority. The propaganda
being spread around today by the CIA and its propagandists that, "What the
CIA does is ordered by the President," is totally untrue in all but .00001
percent of actual historical cases. It is much more factual to say that,
"What the CIA does is to find ways to initiate major foreign policy moves
without having the President find out -- or at least without discovery until
it is too late."
"It is in precisely that manner that the CIA today works around, beneath and
behind the White House to effect policies that could influence the survival
of the nation and the world. "Gold Key" operatives are, at this very moment,
carrying out CIA game plans entirely outside the power of President Ford's
ability to affect their activities. He is totally without knowledge of most
of them, and therefore powerless to stop or alter them.
In the case of the helicopters, Frank Hand was able to convince Allen Dulles
that the disapproval from the Secretary of Defense, via my office, was real
and that the Secretary would, at that time, be unlikely to change his mind.
Frank also could report that the position of other top-level assistants was
so cool to stepping up the hardware involvement of the military in Vietnam,
in 1960, that none of them would likely attempt to persuade the Secretary to
change his policy of limited involvement.
Fortified with the information gleaned by Frank Hand, Allen Dulles would have
two primary options: drop the idea of moving helicopters into Vietnam, or
bypass the Secretary of Defense for the time being by going to the White
House for support. In 1960 this was a crucial decision. The huge attempt to
support a rebellion in Indonesia had failed utterly, the U-2 operations had
been curtailed because of the Gary Powers incident, the far-reaching
operations into Tibet had come to a halt by Presidential directive and
anti-Castro activities were limited to minor forays. And at that time the
large-scale (large for CIA) war in Laos had become such a disaster that the
CIA wanted no more of it. Dick Bissell, the chief of the Clandestine
Services, had written strong, personal letters to Tom Gates, the Secretary of
Defense, wondering openly what to do about the 50,000 or more miserable
Laotian Meo tribesmen the CIA had moved into the battle zones of Laos and
then had deserted with no plans for their protection, resupply, care or
feeding. The CIA badly wanted to be relieved of the war that they had started
and then found they could not handle. They wanted to transfer and thus
preserve the agency's assets, including the helicopters, to the bigger
prospects in Vietnam.
So, in 1960, if Allen Dulles dropped the idea of moving his assets from Laos,
he would not only have lost those helicopters back to the Marine Corps but he
would have seriously jeopardized the CIA's undercover leadership role in the
development of the war in Vietnam, which it had been fanning since 1954.
This was a crucial decision for both the CIA and for those who wished to
contain the agency. If those who wished to put the CIA genie back in the
bottle had been able at that time to prevent the move of those CIA assets
into Vietnam, Dulles would have had to disband them: helicopters, B-26
bombers from the Indonesian fiasco, tens of thousands of rifles and other
weapons, C-46, C-54 and o
