-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.prouty.org/ Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.prouty.org/">The Col. L. Fletcher Prouty Reference Site</A> ----- Understanding Special Operations David T. Ratcliffe rat haus reality press Santa Cruz, California ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright © 1999 by David T. Ratcliffe All rights reserved. rat haus reality press, 567 35th Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA 95062 www.ratical.org Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. _______________________________________________________________________ 1st edition, first printing. ISBN 0-9673507-0-0 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-75115 Manufactured in the United States of America on 60% recovered and 25% post-consumer waste recylced paper with soy-based inks. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ For my parents, John and Elizabeth Ratcliffe, who taught me to seek out life's infinite possibilities, and all who strive to build a sustainable civilization where nature, humanity, and technology manifest a contemporary wholeness that serves and honors life. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Special Operations are an ad hoc creation -- probably the strongest ad hoc creation in our government today. -- L. Fletcher Prouty, 1999 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright Table Of Contents Acknowledgments Forward Introduction 1. Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty's Military Experiences 1941-1963 Part I: 1941-1945 * Entering the Army, the Air Corps, and Air Transport Command * Air Transport Command Pilot: North Africa * Air Transport Command Pilot: the Middle East * Air Transport Command Pilot: Eurasia * Air Transport Command Pilot: the West Pacific Part II: 1945-1961 * On Okinawa: The Surrender of Japan, and a 500,000 manpack Re-Routed to Korea and Indochina * 1946-1948: Inaugurating the Air Force's ROTC Program at Yale * 1949-1950: Writing the First USAF ROTC text book on Aeronautics and a Major Portion of Rockets and Guided Missiles * 1950-1951: A New Air Defense Command * 1952-1954: Managing Tokyo International Airport And Heavy-Transport Flying * 1955: Attending the Armed Forces Staff College * 1955: Assignment to New Position of "Focal Point" Officer for Air Force Support of U.S. Government Clandestine Operations * Coordination of the CIA: How Covert Operations Are Run * The Suez Crisis of 1956 * The CIA in Europe * Nuclear Warfare: the CIA becomes a Fourth Force * Cuba, 1959-1960: From Over-The-Beach Work to Invasion Part III: 1961-1963 * Experiences of and Perspectives on the Bay of Pigs * A Result of CIA Covert Military Commanders in Vietnam: The League of Families for the Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia * JFK Prepares To Get Out Of Vietnam: The Taylor/McNamara Trip Report of October 1963 and NSAM 263 * The Murders of President Diem and Kennedy * Explanation of the Office of Special Operations-- Military Services Providing Support to Government Clandestine Activities * The Economy Act of 1932: Handling The Money To Run Covert Operations * Clarifying the Role of the National Security Agency (NSA) * Abolishing the OSO and Moving Special Operations Into the JCS 2. Understanding The Secret Team in the Post-World War II Era Part I * In The Context of Its Time: The National Security Act of 1947 * The Creation of the National Security Council * The Dulles-Jackson-Correa Report * Opening the Door to CIA Clandestine Operations: Shifting NSC Oversight from Directing to Approving Plans * The Function of the Director of Central Intelligence: Coordinating Intelligence of the Government Intelligence Community * Clandestine Operations: Out of Control If Not Directed by the National Security Council * Four Categories of Military Personnel Employed by CIA * Final Chapter in the History of War Making: Going From Offense to Defense * The Threat of Nuclear Weapons: Making War Planning Obsolete * Creating a Manichaean Devil to Justify Spending $6 Trillion for a Cold War * Secret Team Foundations: Creation of the CIA Focal Point System Throughout The Government Part II * The Power of Indirection-- Military Units Financed and Controlled by the CIA * Secret Team Growth: Focal Point Personnel Assuming Broader Roles * Obtaining Everything Money Can Buy: The CIA Act of 1949 and Secretary of Defense Johnson's paper on Covert Operations * Employing the System of Reimbursement To Fund Unaccountable Activities * Post WWII War Plans--CIA Begins Amassing Its Own Stockpile of Military Equipment * From the Chairman of the JCS On Down: "where the CIA was concerned there were a lot of things no one seemed to know" * The Importance of the CIA's Deputy Director of Support (DD/S) Side of the Agency by the Time of the Bay Of Pigs * Congressional Non-Oversight of Agency Funding and Executive Branch Responsibility for CIA * The Significance of the Sense of Infallibility Leaders of the Agency Felt Imbued With * The ST Running A Government Of Reaction: Develop and Control All Secret Intelligence, And Brief The President On It Every Day Part III * Allen Dulles: Forging a Government of Reaction * Dispersion of the OSO, Creation of the Office of SACSA * DOD Adoption of a Counterinsurgency Role in the late Eisenhower Years * NSAM 55--JFK's Attempt to Get CIA out of Clandestine Operations * Chairman of the JCS: Exit Lyman Lemnitzer, Enter Maxwell Taylor * Bay of Pigs Post-Mortem and the Dynamics of Personality: Allen Dulles, Maxwell Taylor, and Bobby Kennedy * Bay of Pigs Report: Taylor's Letter to the President and the Origin of NSAM Nos. 55-57 * Understanding the Military Assistance Program (MAP) * The Little Red Book's Influence on General Stilwell and Lansdale * MAP as a Sensor to React To * MAP's Ultimate Manifestation: Iran * The Secret Team: Far Beyond the Capability of the CIA * An Impossible Contradiction: Covert Operations Must Be Deniable 3. A Very Special Operation: The Assassination of President Kennedy Part I * What Would Entail Conducting A Proper Murder Investigation? * In Context: August-November 1963 * Cancelling Secret Service, Military, and Police Units in Dallas and Inserting False Actors in Their Place * The Volume and Significance of the Photographic Evidence * The Christchurch Star's Impact Upon the Facts of the Assassination Part II * The Existence of a High Cabal or Power Elite * Magellan's Circumnavigation of the Globe: The Philosophy That Derived From Knowing the World Was Finite * The Development of the East India Companies and "Proprietary" Colonies * Inventorying Earth: Haileybury College and the Roles of Malthus and Darwin * Two Books: The End of Economic Man and The Road To Teheran * The Changing Nature of Warfare: From a Military to an Economic Basis * Human History and the Composition of the High Cabal * Building a Bridge: Trusting Ourselves to Know How to Work and Live Together Epilogue Appendix A * Prefaces to 3 Editions of The Secret Team Appendix B * Copies of NSAMs 263 and 273, and Some Primary Supporting Documents Appendix C * NSC 5412, "National Security Council Directive on Covert Operations" Appendix D * Krulak Letter Re: Dealey Plaza Photos And Lansdale Ident Appendix E * Copies of NSAMs 55, 56, and 57 Appendix F * Prouty Letter Regarding JFK Assassination Conspiracy and Cover Story Appendix G * Organizations Dedicated To A Sustainable Future Index Back Cover ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Understanding Special Operations And Their Impact on The Vietnam War Era 1989 Interview with L. Fletcher Prouty Colonel USAF (Retired) 1999. Paper, 424 pp, index, $23.00 + $5 postage and handling. ISBN 0-9673507-0-0 David T. Ratcliffe, Publisher rat haus reality press 567 35th Avenue Santa Cruz, CA 95062 USA [EMAIL PROTECTED] 831/479-1053 Order the book or tapes. ===== Acknowledgments This book exists because of the generosity of L. Fletcher Prouty. I am indebted to him for sharing many, many hours of time, both during my five-day visit with him in 1989, as well as during the long process of editing the original audio recordings. I am especially grateful for Fletcher's patience with my many questions and willingness to provide a broad historical perspective. I deeply value the friendship that has grown up between us. Chris Everett has been my "master typography mechanic", teaching me much about the specific software used to lay out this book, and the dynamic world of printing. Without Chris' great patience and knowledge I could not have created this book. Special thanks to Len Osanic and the people who worked with him to create the original on-line form of Fletcher's 1997 version of The Secret Team[1] , from which I fashioned the hypertext version[2] referenced in footnote citations throughout Chapter 2 . Tom Davis and John Judge were also instrumental in making this book possible. Both friends have given me many critical insights by sharing their knowledge and experience of history, how it is made, and guiding me to books that provided essential background to formulate well-conceived questions. Tom also provided me with copies of the Freedom articles and John introduced me to Fletcher. And then there is Mae Brusell. I am indebted to the indefatigable spirit of this first-generation JFK assassination researcher. In 1963, a housewife in Carmel, California, Mae was stunned to see Lee Harvey Oswald executed on live television -- just as her daughter was packing up her teddy bear to send to Lee because she felt sorry for him. "What is happening to this country of ours?!" This question led Mae to pursue decades of research seeking to unravel the meaning of this seminal post-WWII event which so shaped succeeding decades. Mae's World Watchers radio program eventually led me to Tom and John and thus to Fletcher. Finally I am especially grateful to my parents who raised me with a deep curiosity about what the nature of being human means and who encouraged in me a deep desire to understand the inner and outer worlds as clearly and honestly as possible. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. See http://www.prouty.org/cdrom.html 2. Available at http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/ ===== Forward In 1988, I read a series of 19 articles on the CIA and the Vietnam war era spanning the period from 1945 to 1964, written by Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, USAF (Retired), and published in Freedom magazine from 1985 to 1987. These articles were provided by Tom Davis, a first-generation JFK assassination researcher. I met Tom through his capacity as bookseller after some years of listening to Mae Brussell's weekly radio program, World Watchers. Tom generously loaned me copies of the issues he no longer had extras of. I proceeded to cut-and-paste photocopies of the complete series to create a reader-type format (minus headers, footers, and ads) to share with people. I felt Prouty's insights and perspective were extraordinary, given his active role in organizing and providing Air Force logistical support for U.S. Government clandestine operations world-wide from 1955 through 1963. The breadth and depth of detail of the CIA's evolution in post-WWII America was also fascinating, as well as the way in which the series culminated in describing events surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy. On November 22, 1963, I was eight years old and sick in bed at home. I recall my father coming up the stairs saying, "President Kennedy's been shot." I don't remember anyone else's reaction, or watching television. Fourteen years later in the fall of 1977, a friend loaned me a copy of Arthur Schlesinger's A Thousand Days, John F. Kennedy in the White House. For the first time I was caught up in the story of Kennedy's presidency and his assassination. Over the next eleven years I read voluminously about the assassinations of the 1960s, and about the rise of the American National Security State. Fletcher's writings gave me a much greater understanding of these subjects. Through Tom Davis I met John Judge, another first-generation assassination researcher who had grown up in Washington D.C. At the end of 1988, John introduced me to Fletcher who was intrigued that someone was sufficiently interested in his articles to compile them into a "Reader". We then began to correspond directly and he agreed to be interviewed. Already very familiar with the contents of the 19 articles, in the months prior to our interview I meticulously studied Fletcher's monumental work, The Secret Team, The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (1973). It is difficult to exaggerate the scope and depth of information presented in The Secret Team. Its contents were based on the first-hand experience of the author, who was intimately involved in formulating and implementing the CIA Focal Point System in the Pentagon and throughout the Executive Branch. The book also sets forth insights gained during his stint as a military briefing officer specializing in Special Operations. It is also difficult to overstate the magnitude of seminal changes that have taken place between 1941 and 1963 in the way that Americans and people in the west thought about the world and their lives. To provide additional background and give people a broader grasp of Fletcher's qualifications to discuss Special Operations, three versions of the Preface to The Secret Team are included in Appendix A. The Preface to the 1973 first edition (starting on page 256) describes Fletcher as "the behind the scenes, faceless, nameless, ubiquitous briefing officer" whose job required both presenting "the most skillfully detailed information" as well as being "trained by years of experience in the precise way to present that information to assure its effectiveness." I was struck by the thought that for Fletcher to have been successful in this area of work, he would need a highly developed ability to size up the character of the person he was briefing. Further, given that Fletcher read "all of the messages, regardless of classification" and had virtually unfettered access to anyone he wanted to talk with, I reasoned that he could provide a wealth of details about this historic period. Some might consider that I may have been taken in by a man who has engaged in his own dissembling and artfully planted "cover stories" on behalf of anonymous persons. Perhaps I am naive and was simply one more person he sized up accurately for a briefing. However, I have always felt Fletcher's openness with me was motivated by a genuine interest to shed light on his areas of expertise as expressed in the last sentence of the 1973 Preface: "It is the object of this book to bring reality and understanding into this vast unknown area." For anyone interested in learning more about the contradictory nature of this subject, The Secret Team is required reading. I flew east May 4-8, 1989. Spending the nights at my cousin's home in Reston, Virginia, I drove each morning to Fletcher's house in Alexandria. The first day we had wide-ranging conversations that included looking through various publications and papers in his study. In this way we were able to create a feeling of familiarity between us and a sense of some of the specific topics we wanted to explore during the actual interview. The interview itself fell into three distinct parts: (1) Fletcher's 23 years of military duty in the Air Force from 1941 through January 1, 1964, (2) his 1973 book The Secret Team, (3) and the assassination of President Kennedy. These transcripts of the recordings were edited to make them as readable as possible without sacrificing their conversational tone.[1] In a few select spots, Fletcher has augmented what he said with text providing more details of his experiences during WWII and other information. The nature of what I wanted Fletcher to talk about concerning what he knew and had experienced made it imperative to lay down a sufficiently robust foundation to support the twists and turns of the "Alice in Wonderland" journey we were preparing to take. In essence, this interview explores one man's first-hand experience of the way in which the United States political system became a government of reaction in the post-WWII world -- reaction based upon the inputs of selective intelligence gathered from around the world and interpreted according to a specific bias. These inputs became a primary source of direction for the government's economic, political, and social actions through the influence of such individuals as Allen Dulles, John Foster Dulles, Walter Bedell Smith, Louis Johnson, L. K. "Red" White, Richard Helms, and Frank Hand, as well as from the development of nuclear technology and weapons. This influence produced such laws as the National Security Act of 1947 and the CIA Act of 1949. During our interview and in additional conversations, Fletcher has emphasized the importance of Buckminster Fuller's world-view. He made special note of Bucky's final book, Critical Path. An exceedingly relevant passage to keep in mind throughout this interview is Fuller's awareness of where real power lies: Finally, bigger ships got out of the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic, around Africa to the Orient, and then around the world. Thus, "those in the know" rediscovered that the world is a sphere and not an infinitely extended lateral plane. Great battles ensued -- waged under the flags of England, France, and Spain -- to determine who would become supreme master of the world's high-seas line of supply. These great nations were simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery. Always their victories were in the name of some powerful sovereign-ruled country. The real power structures were always the invisible ones behind the visible sovereign powers.[2] Fletcher draws heavily upon Fuller's explication of the philosophy that derived from knowing the world was round and thus finite to describe the era of global colonization at the hands of the East India Trading companies whose overriding goal was to claim and own property. Since September, 1945, the United States has pursued its own brand of empire following in the footsteps of its Portuguese, British, Dutch, French, and Spanish antecedents. Some of the means that enabled this pursuit are described in this exchange. I hope this book will expand people's understanding regarding some of the less obvious dynamics which continue to shape the story of our time. Also, I hope it will help the reader identify more of the vast number of "pseudo facts" being perpetuated as "truth". David Ratcliffe Santa Cruz, California May, 1999 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. The complete set of eight tapes is available from rat haus reality press. See: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/USO/tapes.html 2. R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, St. Martin's Press, 1981, p.72 --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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