-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- from: http://www.prouty.org/ Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.prouty.org/">The Col. L. Fletcher Prouty Reference Site</A> ----- The Importance of the CIA's Deputy Director of Support (DD/S) Side of the Agency by the Time of the Bay Of Pigs Ratcliffe: You write further on that By the time of the Bay of Pigs operation, the CIA was part of a greater team, which used the Agency and other parts of the Government to carry out almost any secret operation it wanted. By that time this organization had the equipment, the facilities, the men, and the funds to carry out clandestine operations that were so vast that even on the basis of simple definition they were no longer truly secret, nor could anyone hope that they might be. The availability of supplies and facilities made it possible for all of this to come about. The growth of the CIA and of the greater Secret Team has resulted more from the huge success of the DD/S side of the Agency than from either the DD/P or the DD/I.[11] Please comment on the importance you ascribe to this DD/S side of the Agency. Prouty: It's one thing to have approval to carry out a covert operation and then to be able to go to the Defense Department or any other part of the Government and get support for that operation. It's something else entirely to have warehouses full of equipment -- ships, aircraft, and people all over the world -- and be able to carry out covert operations on a regular basis. You've used a good point of reference -- the Bay of Pigs. By 1960, when President Eisenhower approved the early actions that later led to the Bay of Pigs -- and these were very, very small matters -- the Agency itself was able to schedule a program that they knew was going to be a major program. Any of us in covert operations knows that 3,000 men in a program that led to putting -- what was it -- twelve hundred, thirteen hundred troops on a beach in a foreign country is not covert. You can't train 3,000 men in Guatemala, Nicaragua -- some unfortunately in Mexico by inadvertence -- and operate radio stations off islands in the Caribbean, etc., and call it covert. It's just a joke. The New York Times was reporting almost daily on the program. Castro was broadcasting about its threat almost daily. And yet, it was called a covert program. The thing that was against it's being covert was its size. But, be that as it may, the CIA had the aircraft -- they had the B-26's. In fact, as I think I said earlier, we had created an Air Force for the Cuban exiles -- a tactical combat Air Force that was larger than any Air Force in Latin America at the time. All of that came from CIA assets. It was made up of their own aircraft. They were planes that had been used in the Indonesia business. They took planes back from the Vietnam theater. They used a lot of C-54's that Air America had provided. As a matter of fact, it's very interesting what they did do. They even brought Philippine Army officers who had worked with General Lansdale in the Magsaysay campaign in the Philippines, back in the fifties -- they even brought some of those officers into Guatemala to do the training there. You see, they had the facilities that were world-wide even involving people from other governments. This is what they had gotten into existence in time to run something like this anti-Castro program. Yet, when it started, the first request the Agency made to the Department of Defense, when they got the approval from Eisenhower to start this anti-Castro move, was for two Navy doctors. That's all they needed. They said, `We need two Navy doctors.' The Navy did not want to give up two doctors at that time. They didn't have two that they could give up because it was a long-term, indeterminate period. So the CIA men came to my office and they asked if could we get two Air Force doctors. Most of our doctors were flight surgeons -- we did not want to give them up. But I talked to our chief surgeon in the Air Force, and he had a few doctors at that time -- I think at Lackland Air Base in Texas -- that would be willing to do this on a voluntary basis, and that he could spare. So it happened that we sent two Air Force doctors to begin the program -- that 's all it was. They didn't ask us for anything else. Here's the anti-Castro program beginning and they wanted two doctors. Of course we asked them why, and the reason was they were going to put hundreds of Cuban exile men who were enrolled in the Army at a small military base that belonged to the U.S. -- it was used by the U.S. -- in Panama. And they needed doctors because the men would be in the base in Panama. They didn't ask us for equipment. They didn't ask us for airplanes, and rifles, and trucks, and everything else. They already had all that. So just by filling in with a few things they didn't have, they could be ready to go. And they were ready to go more than we thought. They had a lot of capability. Within a month or so, they were building a big air base over near Retalhuleu in Guatemala. They did this themselves -- bulldozers and every other darn thing they bought for the construction with their own money. So by the time of the 1960s, the Agency could run major operations -- major warfare you might call it -- by themselves. This led to an interesting bit of political development because during the summer of 1960, we were using a primarily World War II transport aircraft, called a C-46, that could carry 40 or 50 people -- carry a pretty good-sized cargo. We'd fly it from Guatemala or Nicaragua to Cuba. We would not fly it from the United States. We didn't want any reference to the United States -- they still thought they were playing a covert game. And we'd make airdrops in Cuba. This was a touch-and-go game and many of the airdrops just disappeared -- they didn't drop to the right people, or Castro found out about it and intercepted it for them. But in any case, that's what they were doing: small airdrops, and mostly of equipment, weapons, communications gear to what they thought were people on the ground who would handle it in the anti-Castro movement. That went on until the political campaign of 1960. And it was pretty active. The most active person on this -- from the Administration side -- was Richard Nixon and he was running for President against Kennedy. Within a week after that very close election where Kennedy won, the Agency came in and told us that they were planning for a force of 3,000 Cuban exiles and that their target would be an invasion of Cuba. This is something they developed themselves. I know very well from the repeated dealings we had with the White House from March of '60 until November of '60 that President Eisenhower never, never authorized an invasion of Cuba. But the Agency, able to plan that for themselves, and realizing Eisenhower was in a lame duck position after the election, and that Kennedy -- although he knew about this training program -- had no idea what the limitations put on it were, would probably accept this kind of thing. They just moved it from small airdrops, or over-the-beach -- we put a lot of teams over-the-beach from pontoon raft equipment and such -- and the next thing you know, we were in this big program. So that when Allen Dulles and Richard Bisse ll briefed Kennedy, I think, in the end of November or early December of '60, down at Kennedy's home in West Palm Beach, they were talking of a 3,000-man force -- not these little intermittent airdrops. I think there are two facts here though, that the Agency wasn't aware of. Kennedy knew the Cuban leaders. One of Kennedy's close friends was Senator Smathers of Florida. Senator Smathers had connections with many of the Cuban people in Florida and I think he had briefed Kennedy. Because in an interesting little event -- I was asked one day to go from the Pentagon to the Senate Office Building to Senator Kennedy's office and to take a car that could carry six people -- the driver, myself, and four passengers. So I went over to the Senate Office Building and went into Kennedy's office, and I sat there for a few minutes and the Senator came out, shaking hands good-bye to four men who were Cubans. I could tell by their Spanish accent, I could tell by their names Kennedy called them, and they seemed like old friends. Kennedy was patting one of them on the back and saying, `Well, we'll see what we can do for you,' and all that sort of thing. And then the Senator turned to me and he said, `The Secretary of Defense wants to meet these people. You please take them back to the Pentagon, to see the Secretary of Defense.' One of those four men was Manuel Artime. Artime was the Commanding Officer on the beach of the brigade in Cuba. Kennedy knew Artime. And he had talked with Artime. He knew what Artime's plans were. The second man, Mendonca, was one of a former -- I believe a former president of Cuba -- for a short time. There was a man named de Varona who was one of the leaders of the Cuban exile group. And I can't recall the fourth man. But that's the type of people they were. They were the top people that Allen Dulles had put together for the Cuban exile group. And here was Kennedy meeting them privately in his own office. He knew them ahead of time. So the people that think Kennedy didn't know what was going on don't understand how much experience Kennedy had with this kind of thing. Ratcliffe: When do you think that meeting really was? Prouty: This took place in August of 1960. Ratcliffe: He'd already gotten the nomination by then. In August of 1960, they'd already had the Democratic Convention that summer. Prouty: I'm talking about that period. Artime had just come from addressing the annual American Legion Convention in Detroit that year, which, was in August of 1960. These things were happening one right on top of the other. The most important thing was that people were saying Nixon knew all about this brigade going into Cuba but Kennedy didn't know about it. Kennedy did. He was smart. He kept it quiet. As this force developed, by January of 1961 -- just before the inaugural -- the Agency was making regular plans for an invasion on the beach. And they brought in a Marine Colonel named Jack Hawkins to do the tactical planning -- to make the plans for it. And it was a very good plan. I think I mentioned earlier, they decided that the absolute foundation of the plan was to wipe out all Castro's combat aircraft. Which meant the CIA was going to use B-26's that had been developed for the Indonesian campaign, and use them to destroy Castro's air force on the ground before they ever invaded the beach. This was the key to that operation. Well, I'll go that far with this story because I don't think we're supposed to be talking about the Bay of Pigs. But you see, they could do these things themselves. Even the beginning of combat in Laos and combat in Vietnam were done with equipment that the Agency owned by the period of 1960-61. It had become a major combat force at that time. Ratcliffe: Do you think, from your own experiences, that Allen Dulles knew back in the late forties -- or at least by the time he wrote the Dulles-Jackson-Correa report -- how important this component of the CIA would be? Prouty: Mr. Dulles realized that covert operations require materiel. And they also realized that if you don't have your own, you can't make your plans yourself. Having to make plans with borrowed equipment is always rather difficult. The reason I go back to this Jackson Correa-Dulles document so often, and why I called it the Dulles Mein Kampf, was this was the plan of the future of CIA. There's no question about that. And it was based upon having the ability to do it with equipment on hand: the bases, the people, the airplanes, the ships, everything else. Congressional Non-Oversight of Agency Funding and Executive Branch Responsibility for CIA Ratcliffe: Writing about some of the attempts of some Senators, or Congresspeople, to try to have more oversight of these potentially run-away capabilities, you write: It was in 1955 that Senator Mansfield, among others, attempted to get a law through the Congress that would establish a strong watchdog committee to oversee the CIA. One of the principal reasons this law did not pass was that such CIA stalwarts as Senator Russell and Senator Saltonstall affirmed that there was no need for such committees. . . . I have worked closely with Senator Saltonstall, and many others, who were on those committees, and except in rare instances, they never knew that the CIA was so huge. They knew how big the CIA was within the bounds of the `real' or intelligence organization; but none of them knew about its tremendous global base capability, and what is much more important, none of them knew the intricacies of the Agency's supporting system that existed in the name of the Army Special Forces and the Air Force Air Resupply and Communications Wings . . . no one man or no one group of knowledgeable men had ever had the opportunity to see the whole picture. As I have heard Senator Saltonstall say, `Now don't tell me about that classified material. What I don't know won't hurt me.' That has been a general attitude on Capitol Hill. In discussions I have had with responsible committeemen on the Hill, I have found this to exist as recently as September 1971. This situation has not changed much. There are no Congressmen and no Senators who really know about the Agency and about what the Agency is doing.[12] I'd like you to discuss this crippling impact on the very essence of our constitutional form of government, that is every day becoming more and more endemic, because of elected officials betraying the responsibilities of their office when they indicate no desire whatsoever to be accurately appraised of "classified material" and its fundamental implications. Prouty: Of course, that varies with individuals and it varies with time. But it's a pretty accurate statement -- unfortunately so. You see, in the eyes of Congress, when they created CIA, they were creating a coordinating organization only. That doesn't give them too much power. So the Congressmen can sit back and say, look, we wrote the law, here's what the law says, and this is what we expect it to do. Except for one thing: the amount of money that they've been appropriating to this ever-expanding organization. So I can't excuse them for not realizing that there's a requirement for oversight. Where's the money going? But then again they effectively back out of that because only a few Congressmen know how much money is appropriated. It's a very narrow area. But that doesn't mean they don't know. And, again, it's their responsibility. So they lean on the fact that, look, to control the CIA we created an organization called the NSC -- the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense. If they can't control that organization -- those are our top people -- then what are you talking to us about? It isn't Congress' job. And from that point of view, they're accurate. It is not up to the Congressmen to control the covert operations -- it's up to the Administration because they're the ones that direct it. At least, by law. So you can make a case for both sides. During my work with this activity, I was told frequently and regularly by senior officers in the Pentagon -- Generals and Secretaries of Departments and so on -- to go over to the Congress and speak to the cleared Congressman about what we were doing on a certain covert operation. I remember in my first clearance, it was explained to me that Senator Russell and Senator Saltonstall were the cleared officers -- cleared Senators. I went over to see them. Well, it just happened that Senator Saltonstall knew my father -- my father knew Saltonstall pretty well. So when he heard my name -- right away, "How's your father? How are things?" and we got along just great. Then I said, "Now look, General Martin has sent me over here to talk to you about a covert operation which CIA is running." To which the Senator responded, "Now look, if General Martin knows about that operation, and if the Defense Department is taking care of it, I don't need to know about that, Colonel. What I don't know . . . " And really, this was the way it was handled. I wouldn't say that he meant it exactly that way but that's what you get because I know I wasn't able to tell him about it. He didn't want to hear it. The very fact that I came to tell him I think was simply enough to confirm that we were in some operation that he'd hear about later -- especially if something went wrong -- and that would do. That would suffice. But he wasn't going to sit there and be the conduit for everything we knew in the Defense Department, between himself, and then all of the rest of the members of Congress. He may have felt that if he told them about one operation then they'd expect him to tell them about all of them, and that would be bedlam for him, too. But that's trying to make a case for him. What I can report to you is that in my many, many visits both to Saltonstall and Russell -- and then a lot of others, that's just two I recall -- the general feeling was that if the operation had been directed by the President -- by the NSC -- and if the Defense Department was supporting the CIA, then it must be all right, it must be official. You can't read it any other way. I mean, they weren't joking about this. It's just that they were saying, `We've set this system up, it should work.' But as you can see, it proliferated into things that they didn't know about. And now, again, with the Iran-Contra thing, you have Congress saying, `Look, we didn't know anything about that at all.' And we have NSC saying, `We don't know anything about it at all.' So you see, it does get worse and worse when you try to run things that way. But that was my own experience with it, I could not brief Senators. They would not listen to it. Ratcliffe: Because they felt it was in the proper hands that it should be in. Prouty: They thought that the very fact that I was there proved to them that it must be in proper hands. You can see the man's point of view. Because if I'm there to tell him, he's saying `Okay, it must be a legitimate organization.' If it was a real sneaky one, I wouldn't have been there. So, that's his rationale. The Significance of the Sense of Infallibility Leaders of the Agency Felt Imbued With Ratcliffe: You quote extensively from Lyman Kirkpatrick's book, The Real CIA, who you describe as a very exemplary officer and capable man. Quoting in The Secret Team, quoting from this book The Real CIA: Among the inner group of top Agency careerists [this is talking about Kirkpatrick], he was a moderate and a most dedicated man. As a result, his statement [the excerpts from his book, The Real CIA] takes on a very special meaning. It is an example of the blind statement of faith found in a religious order. The great error and the great damage, however, from this kind of thinking arises in the fact that it is predicated upon the belief that the leaders of the Agency can do no wrong. When the same organization is given the authority to develop and control all foreign secret intelligence and to take its findings, based upon the inputs of this secret intelligence, directly to the last authority, the President -- not only to take it to him regularly but to pre-empt his time, attention, and energies, almost to the point of making him their captive -- and then also is given the authority and the vast means to carry out peacetime clandestine operations, that agency has been given the power to control the foreign operations of the Government on a continuing day to day basis.[13] Please comment on the effect, or effects, this sense of infallibility that the leaders of the Agency felt imbued with had on the decisions and choices they made and on the goals they defined. Prouty: The first part of your question ought to be dealt with a little bit. Lyman Kirkpatrick, Ray Cline, Pier DeSilva are three men with extensive agency experience who have written books. Fortunately their books are better than most books that are written by outsiders. They don't try to hide things or change things or conceal things from the public. Now, they don't include certain activities, they just don't put them in the book. But they are reliable (I have a very large library of Agency books most of which are trash). But those three, former careerists, are quite responsible and if I had to pick one, I would pick Lyman Kirkpatrick's. Now remember, of course, that it was written 25 years ago. But it's still a good book. Lyman Kirkpatrick served in many capacities in the Agency and if it had not been for the unfortunate fact that he had a very serious case of paralysis and had to travel around in a wheelchair, I'm sure he would have followed Allen Dulles as the Director of Central Intelligence instead of Dick Helms because -- not that Dick Helms wasn't qualified, but Kirkpatrick would have followed Dulles. And that was unfortunate. So that what he says about the Agency is generally accurate, and he was really, among his friends and acquaintances in the Agency, a competent person and a reliable person and I found him to be that way. The problem the Agency has is that a lot people write about it who really have never served a day with it or if they have, they have some sort of axe to grind -- one way or the other. Another writer who worked right in the Agency's headquarters and wrote a really good book about the Agency with John Marks is Victor Marchetti. It's hard to get a good book about the Agency unless you've been an insider. There's no question about it. The other people that write have got some little angle or axe to grind and their books are not good -- they're not accurate. So, I wish to make that statement pretty clear while we have it on the record. Now, repeat the last question and I'll circle back to the rest of the item. Ratcliffe: I'd like you to comment on the effect or effects, this sense of infallibility that the leaders of the Agency felt imbued with, had on the decisions and choices they made and on the goals they defined. Prouty: To really understand CIA, you have to remember that perhaps its best cover story is that it's an intelligence organization. It doesn't do much intelligence. Intelligence is gathered by other assets throughout the Government, also. The Agency has quite a bit; but that isn't why they were created. Covert operations is their big money deal. You divide that up into the mechanical and electronic things like U-2s, and SR-71s and the satellites and all that -- photographs and that whole business. That's the technical side of the agency. Then you get into this other part of covert operations where you're dealing with people -- spies and agents and the like. That's a business that is almost everywhere. These people are the only ones doing covert work. It's a small group of specialists. It's interesting to know that if you are involved in a covert operation in Greece, and you meet the people that are doing that and then you happen to be involved later in a similar operation in Bolivia, you meet the same people. To them, the world is all just one big chess board. When it comes to covert operations, you'll find the same specialists all over the world. It used to amaze me. Of course, I got to know them and their trade-craft. If I were working with them on something up in Teheran and we were running some program there along the border of the Soviet Union, and then later on we're running a program up to Tibet out of Thailand, I'd find they were the same specialists. It's a relatively small group in covert operations. Their real leaders are anonymous. On the other hand, when you get to a man like Howard Hunt -- his name is in books all the time -- they're there. They're in the scenery. But they aren't the movers. They aren't the real deep operators. The ones that really run these exercises are a group of professional characters. It's just like a pro football team. They are good. They've got the people who can carry the ball, and they've got the people who can block, and so on. And, really, I have the greatest respect for them. Their leaders, such as Bill Colby, Dick Helms, Allen Dulles, Des Fitzgerald, and so on, are convinced that what they are doing is right and that they are able. They have the ability, as Dulles said in his book, he understood The Craft of Intelligence. And the craft is this covert business. So that's what I mean by writing about it. They are the dominant people in this business. In today's world, you can guess at the names of -- when they bring people in briefly, like they did Admiral Raborn or like they did George Bush, you get a man that really is just keeping the seat warm, there. It takes a long time to bring somebody up to this capability. The key ones are men like Dulles and Dick Helms. Dick Helms was a very effective person in charge of covert operations. Then you've pointed out that I put considerable stress on their "Support" side. You can't do any of this thing without the support. The Deputy Director of Support, called DD/S, was an organization headed by one of the most important CIA men of all, Colonel L. K. White -- "Red" White. His skilled organization for global support for CIA was the envy of anybody. If he wanted to run a Federal Express delivery system, he could have done it off the back of his hand. If he wanted to run any other organization, he could. He was great. Now, he had within his logistics system a deputy strictly for Supply so that all of the things he needed were there, and he had his own money man. The head of finance for the CIA was within logistics where he belonged. And then he had shops -- for instance, one called TSS. This is where they would take equipment that the Army might call rather far out and then go further themselves. They developed all these spy gadgets that you see in magazines and books -- and even better. I have enormous respect for the capability of the DD/S area under L. K. White. A little incident -- every CIA man traveling around the world always goes on a code name. I forget some of them, but whenever Des Fitzgerald or Dick Helms or somebody would travel, they'd use a code name. When White traveled, his code name was Ballou. And the reason it was Ballou -- he was "Red" White and Ballou. It broke the code as soon as the people figured that out. But he had under him, in supply, a Navy Captain named Garrison who had spent all his life in Navy supply and he knew the business very well. His finance man matched our finance man in the Defense Department and they were very good. And really, it was DD/S that made things work between our organizations. When they needed boats, when they needed aircraft, they were there. DD/S was very fundamental in all of the proprietary operations, like, Air America, and the other units they had world-wide. That's quite a job because you're dealing there with civilian establishments right alongside military-type operations. Not enough has been said about the strengths of the supporting groups in the CIA. Ratcliffe: Do you think this sense of infallibility is still fully active today? Prouty: I think Casey brought it back. I don't know about it since Casey. But you could see it with Casey. I think Casey figured he could have done anything. Who was it -- Atlas -- give him a big enough lever and he'll lift the world? I think Casey felt that way. I think Casey was the nearest to Dulles as a true CIA leader that any that they've had. He was another big-time lawyer. Ratcliffe: And is that, in part, because he was from that original OSS core group under Donovan along with Dulles and Helms? Prouty: That could have a lot to do with it. It's the man. It's the type of person. Indomitable. Allen Dulles, with all his experience, nothing ever shocked him. He was able to do things. This is kind of strange, because otherwise, he seemed like a little college professor, kind of meek and mild. But you charge him with doing something and he's going to do it. He's just going to do it! The ST Running A Government Of Reaction: Develop and Control All Secret Intelligence, And Brief The President On It Every Day Ratcliffe: Following from above -- this "same organization is given the authority to develop and control all foreign secret intelligence" -- define for us the term, secret intelligence. Prouty: A lot of people have trouble with that. Secret operations of course are clandestine activities. So we divide the two. Secret intelligence is when you have to use spies, bribery, threats, murder, assassinations, in order to gain intelligence -- in order to gain information or to protect information. Secret intelligence is a very special intelligence you aren't going to get any other way. And it's the key division of the intelligence sector. It served its purpose for Dulles because he would say, `Look, if you're charging us with collecting intelligence' -- which the law didn't do but he would put it that way -- `then, of course, in order to do it sometimes, we have to do these other things which are covert operations.' And he kept pushing from secret intelligence into covert operations. It was a springboard for him. And so he was always talking about secret intelligence as though that was the most important kind of intelligence. And then he was talking about covert operations so that he could get his secret intelligence. It was a kind of a professional tactic of his to get in -- but in the vernacular, "secret intelligence" is what the Navy calls "Black intelligence." Ratcliffe: This essence of the ability of the Secret Team to exist at all in terms of this team or organization being able to, first, develop and control all foreign secret intelligence, and second, being able to then have full and unfettered access to the last authority to brief him on this controlled information -- please comment on this complete control of this entire system that enables the Secret Team to function. Prouty: It's a good thing you picked that up. It's more important than most people have any idea -- if they know about it at all. Every single day, intelligence is collected from all around the world by all of our intelligence capacity. Whether it comes from the Treasury Department or the CIA or wherever. During the night, that is carefully boiled down to the essence of the intelligence of the day. Partly, because it completes the intelligence of yesterday and, partly, because something new comes in, and every once in a while, there is some more-or-less academic approach to open up a subject that needs to be described because it's very important. The Agency has been given the responsibility of doing that evaluation daily and then to do the collation of all this and, finally, the early morning presentation to the President. It's a terrific job they do. And if you get used to seeing Walter Cronkite on TV every night, you think you're seeing the essence of the world news. Well you've seen nothing until you've seen this secret intelligence report that is delivered every morning to the President. It's beyond anybody's belief -- it is so good, it's so important. The Agency used to have a man named Kemp that was just astounding for this business. And some of their best men do this work. It's done during the night. So that in the morning, a pre-brief is given in the Pentagon, way down in the double basement of the Pentagon, in a big room there for about 50 security-cleared people. That doesn't mean they're all there each day -- maybe only 35 or 40 -- but there are only about 50 people in the entire Pentagon -- 35,000 people -- who have the special security clearance to hear this pre-brief before the President does. The pre-brief is a dry run. It's all the briefers of that day and all of their material and it lasts, maybe, half-an-hour. And they make this briefing for the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the others. They all hear this same brief that day. And then these key briefers leap into their cars, go to the White House, and brief the President. That's why it's called a pre-brief at the Pentagon. The President hears this entire briefing. As you can see, that's a very formative thing. For instance, the Cabinet Officers hear that briefing. The President hears it. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff hears it. During the day, that becomes their agenda. Because, let's say something comes up during that day that involves Teheran, immediately they get all their Teheran experts on that subject. Much of what makes Washington run that day, whether people realize it or not, comes down from that pre-brief, through the Cabinet Officers, through the top people. The Cabinet officer picks up his phone as soon as he gets back to his office and says, `Hey, Charlie, get into this for me right away, I want everything you've got on that'. And the next man, and the next man . . . And they go back and they tell the Navy do this, and the Air Force, you do this. Because the pre-brief is saying what's going on this day from all over the world. The newspapers don't even begin to get into the depth of this brief. Then you begin to realize that to a considerable extent, the briefing of the President every day and the pre-brief system provides the Government with its agenda every day. And it's repeated the next day. And it's repeated the next day, and so on. So that the Government moves along this line because, as we said before, when you use intelligence to run your activities, you are reacting. You are responding. You are on the defensive team of a football game -- you're not on the offensive team. It is the power of this pre-brief everyday from the intelligence inputs that has been leading our Government since the forties, and has created a system of government that is not what government is supposed to be. Government should be leadership. Just like I was talking about the Defense Department. We have a Defense Department, we don't have a War Department. It's so different. That's why I say that the pre-brief, as given daily by the intelligence community -- and usually with the DCI right there, and the way Allen Dulles preempted this role -- well, it actually began with Bedell Smith -- but, he preempted this role, and then moved intelligence right into the White House and began to lead the Government every single day. It has an enormous impact on what we might call the political life of the United States. Whether we realize it or not. Now another point. A working President has how many hours a day -- 16? If you take up one of his hours in the morning, you've taken up 1/16th of the time of the most important man in the world. And the intelligence community has created a situation by which they preempt that time and he can't get loose from it. He's there. Now I don't know if each President has gone there every day. But, you see, the system's there every day. It doesn't matter who's there in person, really. I think that we have not considered the enormous importance of intelligence as the guide for our Government and what our Government does and the fact that it runs on reaction. And then the classic idea of Government where the leader is up on a white horse, `Follow me.' Do you understand? He's leading and he's taking the government down the road. We talk about Mr. Bush's first 100 days of leadership. I would imagine Mr. Bush hasn't missed one of these briefings. And I imagine that he's told his people, get on with that and do this. But you see, he's perfectly willing to accept it because he was a DCI. He's the first DCI to ever be President. This is the way he sees how the Government ought to run. And he's not ever going to leave that office. Plus the fact that his administration doesn't have any money in its checking account. This country is "over-drawn." This is a very important subject. And this has been going on for decades. I went to these briefings for years. I must tell you they charge you up something awful. You come out of that room after hearing everything that's going on -- everything from satellite photos to the global weather conditions -- you get everything that's going on diplomatically, militarily, commercially -- everything during that day in that pre-brief. That's powerful stuff. And you're so busy during the day catching up with the things that this pre-brief tells you to do that all of a sudden it's tomorrow and you hear another pre-brief. It sets the stage for what goes on every day. If you haven't been involved in it at that point where you hear it and get the motivation, it's very hard to experience the impact that it has on our government operations. I don't know what the government of England and France and Japan and then in Moscow are doing, but it wouldn't surprise me any that they're doing the same thing. Ratcliffe: Did you attend these pre-briefs? Prouty: Every day. I was one of, I think 52 people in the Pentagon, as I remember, that had the clearance to go. And in my work, there were many times when I was one of the briefers at the pre-brief. So I was involved in it both ways. Ratcliffe: But your pre-brief -- would you participate then in going over to the White House afterwards? Prouty: No. If you're the briefer, you do. In my activities the Chairman would go. Or somebody like that. In fact, by the time the briefing team has been prepared for the White House, the group has been cut down to the Chairman, the DCI, and maybe one or two others. By that time, you're down to Cronkite, you're down to the last talk. That's the way it should be. The thing just goes right down to an apex until you're talking to the President. And it's a very important briefing at that point. Ratcliffe: It is very distilled. Prouty: Yes. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. The Secret Team, p. 260, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp11.html#p260 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., p. 306, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp15.html#p306 4. Ibid., p. 383, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp21.html#p383 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., p. 249, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp11.html#p249 7. See also "The United States Military Consists of the Army, The Air Force, The Navy and Marines, and THE FOURTH FORCE" by L. Fletcher Prouty, Gallery, December, 1975, pp.43-45, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/4thForce.html 8. Ibid., p.257, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp11.html#p257 9. Ibid., p.258, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp11.html#p258 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., p. 261, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp11.html#p261 12. Ibid., p. 248-9, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp11.html#p248-9 13. 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