-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> ----- Bay of Pigs Report: Taylor's Letter to the President and the Origin of NSAM Nos. 55-57 Historians will tell you that there was no report from this group. As a matter of fact, I myself researched for it. I tried to get it in government files in those days. I couldn't get it. I had NSAM 55, but I never realized that NSAM 55 was the report. I had it as a Presidential Directive, and I had to read it to General Lemnitzer as a Presidential Directive. I didn't know that it was -- almost verbatim -- the words of Maxwell Taylor in his Letter to the President. The secrecy surrounding that report, and other things to do with the Bay of Pigs, was remarkable. But I won't address the Bay of Pigs problems at this point. I'll stay with this NSAM 55 and the Taylor Report. Even those of us working intimately with these papers had no idea who had written NSAM 55 for the President. Of course the President didn't write all his papers. Did McGeorge Bundy write it? Did Sorensen (his special Legal Advisor and General Counsel) write it? Who wrote it? We were all trying to find out who wrote this very powerful paper. We thought it was an individual paper, NSAM 55. We didn't realize that it had been extracted, practically verbatim, out of the Taylor/Dulles report. Years later, someone was researching files in the Kennedy Library and came across a box of letters from that era that had been assembled by the GSA. They were relatively nondescript. Some were stamped "Classified". A researcher connected with Harvard University sent me a copy of this Taylor letter and said could I help him identify the letter and its significance? As I read the first paragraphs of one of its Recommendations I realized that this Taylor letter to the President was NSAM 55. Then I realized that this entire letter to the President was actually the Report of the Board. In the intervening time, I had had lunch with Admiral Burke one day in Washington and I asked him, "Admiral, I was just down the hall from the hearings while you were running this review of the Bay of Pigs effort with Bobby Kennedy and Allen Dulles and Maxwell Taylor. I have a hard time believing that there was no Report as a result of your meetings all through that time. You had to make a report to President Kennedy." We're good friends. He looked at me, smiled, and said, "You know, Prouty, we didn't need to write a Report to the President." He said, "That little son-of-a-bitch Bobby was there all the time." And he really made his point because, after all, if Bobby Kennedy was in the room, what do you have to tell Jack Kennedy? I believed him. Years later when I found this Report that had been found in the bales of records that the GSA had assembled, and had not been identified otherwise, I found the same words. Arleigh Burke didn't lie to me about the report. He just didn't tell me that it wasn't a "Report," it was a "Letter." We need to dwell on it, because it was so important in the Kennedy era and to the Kennedy legacy. It explained the role of the Kennedys, and it explained the role of Maxwell Taylor. It explained how they intended to move into this area of the Cold War without an Allen Dulles and without the CIA. Remember what we said: "There was no law that said the CIA should be in covert operations!" The NSAM 56 and the NSAM 57 that accompanied this (but were properly distributed to the Secretary of Defense and the DCI and all the rest) were very powerful documents as well. It wasn't just the one document that came down; it was a whole family of documents. They were all familiar to Taylor, they moved Taylor into being the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I believe that if Kennedy had not been killed, all of them would have been implemented while Maxwell Taylor was Chairman of the JCS. The arguments over these things, the policy developments over how this would be done, carried on well in to and through the year 1962. And by 1963, when you might have expected these things to become operative, the President was killed. Then during the Johnson administration, no one ever mentioned this subject any more. There was so much security over these things, and so much more publicity about the negative aspects of the Bay of Pigs itself, that few people have bothered to go back and look at these very dominant papers that revealed the true intention of the Kennedy administration that certainly would have gone into effect in a second four-year term. Ratcliffe: There are some spin-offs of this that have me wondering what you meant, and of their significance. One is, you write about this postmortem set of hearings in terms that Allen Dulles knew that JFK and RFK "had learned a lot from the Bay of Pigs; and he now knew where the Kennedys' Achilles' tendon was and he had hold of that vital spot."[6] What did you mean by "that vital spot"? What were you speaking of? Prouty: Let me explain something that is a rather practical matter here. I wrote the draft of my book in 1970. I revised it in '71 after the release of the Pentagon Papers because I had then access to all of the Pentagon Papers material. I did not have this original Taylor Report in those days. So I cannot use my knowledge today to tell you why I wrote as I did then and keep the proper story in line. In those days it was clear that the Kennedys were making this change, but we didn't have the evidence that showed that it was Maxwell Taylor, with valuable assistance from General Walter Bedell Smith who had done this. If I had known that when I briefed General Lemnitzer, you can imagine how explosive that would have been. If I'd have said, `Look, this is what Maxwell Taylor told Kennedy and here's what we're going to do', that would have been a hard thing to tell General Lemnitzer. Because General Lemnitzer and Maxwell Taylor were totally different personalities. General Lemnitzer had followed Taylor as the Chief of Staff of the Army. It wasn't that they weren't friends. It's just that they had great differences in their personalities and in their methods of operation within the military. You cannot go back through the years and change things that are dyed in the wool, because I wrote the book based on that earlier information and I learned some of these things later. Ratcliffe: More to the point then here, regarding Lemnitzer when he left the JCS, you wrote: Then President Kennedy made a most significant move, one perhaps that has had more impact upon events during the past ten years than any other that can be attributed to him or his successors. He decided to transfer General Lemnitzer to Paris.[7] What do you think his rationale was for that? Prouty: Lemnitzer was the preeminent commander at that time, at least based on seniority and rank, and Kennedy was always Europe-oriented himself. His father had been Ambassador to the Court of St. James. Lemnitzer was the strongest and best man on duty to take over the post that Eisenhower had held in Europe. Lemnitzer certainly was qualified. I think that was a good assignment. On the other hand Lemnitzer was not going to be the man to run the Vietnam war. I don't think Kennedy had any idea that he'd have to have a strong military commander to run the Vietnam War. He planned to have no American build-up there. He wanted the best man in Europe that he could get and Lemnitzer was the best man. Ratcliffe: One other point. In the book you write: >From 1954 through 1963, all American activity in Vietnam was dominated by the CIA. Although Lansdale and his key men such as Charles Bohanon; Lucien Conein (the U.S. go-between at the time of the Diem coup d'état), Bill Rossen, Arthur Arundel, Rufus Phillips, and others were listed in the Pentagon Papers with military rank, they were all in the employ of the CIA and were operating as CIA agents.[8] I'd be curious if you had knowledge in any of these cases, what did each of these key men of Lansdale's do? What were their particular areas of expertise? Prouty: As we know, there is a book about Lansdale's life, his biography, that explains some of this. Many of these men had worked with Lansdale when he was in the Philippines and when he had been given the authority to work within the Philippines in a covert activity designed to overthrow the President of the Philippines, Quirino, and in his place put a new president, Ramon Magsaysay. Lansdale's assistants then were Bo Bohanon -- and Valeriano, a Filipino. Conein was in Vietnam at the time. I don't think Conein worked in the Philippines. I was flying in and out of the Philippines at the time and met many of these people that were involved. When Lansdale was assigned to Vietnam as Chief of CIA's Saigon Military Mission, he pulled together many of his Philippine team, including Filipinos as well as Americans. He brought into it Arthur Arundel, Rufus Phillips and many others, who were what we call "psychological warfare technicians," as well as other specialists, for the role that Allen Dulles had assigned the undercover Saigon Military Mission in Vietnam. We must remember that, although it was known as the Saigon Military Mission, it was not a military mission and most of its work was not done in Saigon. It was simply a cover arrangement that the Agency had created in early 1954 as they prepared for the development of South Vietnam as an independent nation and for the introduction of Ngo Dinh Diem, as President of Vietnam. This job was assigned to Lansdale very much as he had been assigned the job of producing Magsaysay as President of The Philippines. Ratcliffe: Did Kennedy think that all these men were affiliated with the DOD instead of the CIA? Or did you have any sense of that? Prouty: We'll have to watch the dates here. During the years we are talking about, the fifties, Kennedy had nothing to do with this. However he knew about it. Later, the CIA's Saigon Military Mission was still there. But after the Geneva Agreement in 1954, the introduction of Diem that same year, and the escalation of our activities in Vietnam, the role of the Saigon Military Mission was paramount to all the other activities that were going on in Vietnam. During the Kennedy era, Lansdale had been in the Pentagon from 1957 to October 1963 when he retired. Things had changed greatly in the Kennedy years . Ratcliffe: So it was not a continuum of events. Prouty: That's right. Understanding the Military Assistance Program (MAP) Ratcliffe: There is a great deal to discuss in all of this. I'd like to get into a few more key areas. One is the Military Assistance Program. I'm going to quote briefly from something in the latter part of the book where you were describing A special Presidential committee had been formed early in 1959 to study "Training Under the Mutual Security Program" and to "provide instruction [to recipient countries] in concepts or doctrine governing the employment of the military instrument, in peace and in war." . . . this committee was laying it right on the line that the Government should be stepping into the Mutual Security program with "military" training, including the development of paramilitary capability in the recipient nations. The only way this could be carried out would be to mount clandestine operations in every country where this was to apply. By this period, the CIA knew that it was ready, equipped, and in a position to do this in any "counterinsurgency-list" country, as it had been digging its way firmly into the MAP since the earliest days of the Greek and Turkish aid campaigns.[9] Could you briefly discuss the creation and background of the Military Assistance Program? And how, over time, through CIA agents working within it, and the agenda of overall attempted control by the Agency of its reach and scope, recipient countries found themselves hostages to their own armies -- because of the domination of the ST agenda combining the focus of political, social and economic directives, all under the vast authority of our military, which set up these countries' own military-based governments? (Admittedly, a convoluted question.) Prouty: In order to unravel all that, which is an enormous story, and is very important to understand, I'll point out here that I printed the document you're talking about from the White House (it was a White House document, a very long one) as an appendix to my book.[10] And anyone seriously interested in that most important subject should turn to that, because I can't go through 20 or 30 pages here, and all of the things that it meant, in detail. After World War II there were a number of people in our government who believed that the way to stabilize any other country (especially those in the Third World) was through the strengthening of its army. They believed the army to be a modifying influence in the government. So that, no matter who was running the country, they'd more or less do what the army said. That's quite an imaginative concept -- because it doesn't work that way, of course. The army puts up a dictator and then they run the country themselves. The Little Red Book's Influence on General Stilwell and Lansdale But this was the idea. You might say it was the idea that Lansdale had when he brought Magsaysay to the top in the Philippines. Because in doing that, what he and his Agency supporters planned to do was to create an element within the Philippine army that would sustain Magsaysay through several terms in office, hopefully using elections from one to the other, but using the army to make sure the elections went right. It's hard to describe it and make it all sound sensible, but this is the way they were working. They were saying, `Look, if you create an army that is very stable and has no great ambitions, they'll keep the country going, they'll take care of this responsibility as a force in the middle.' I found out later they were all reading Mao Tse-tung's Little Red Book. They all believed that the army was a school of fish living in the water and the water was the people. It might work for Mao Tse-tung, but I'm not so sure it's going to work in Nicaragua or in Greece. But they were writing this kind of document. The two authors of that paper you're referring to (one was General Stilwell and the other was General Lansdale) had become greatly enamoured of the Little Red Book. I know when I worked with Lansdale, year in and year out in the same office, I'd hear him quote that darned thing -- he could quote it -- no matter what situation we were talking about, he'd have some quotation from the Little Red Book. So to understand this White House paper you have to get into that context. MAP as a Sensor to React To The other side of the idea was that this had much to do with the CIA's philosophy that you react to events. Have the U.S. military out there in all these countries as Military Assistance Program people. Then they're the eyes and ears in that country to see if things are going the way you want them to go. That's what they really meant, that the Military Assistance Program would be a kind of sensor, kind of an intelligence organization, telling you that things are all right in Greece, and things are going fine in Peru. Or alerting you, like they did in Indonesia -- that's how they found out that they thought it was time for a rebellion in Indonesia -- because the Military Assistance people told them so. Of course the CIA operation failed miserably. We can't go through this in a few minutes, but it is extremely important. And it is central to the philosophy of that era, as applied by CIA and by CIA's close associates and allies, not only within the U.S. military, but in other militaries allied with them around the world, like the British, the Australians, the Canadians, and so on. It was part of the Cold War mechanism. Obviously, it hasn't worked. Because a reactionary government is hard to run through another agent. It's what we've tried to make work. That's why we've seen sometimes what we thought were loyal governments overthrown, even though they were anticommunist -- Trujillo, for example. If you want to have an anticommunist in power, you couldn't get a better anticommunist that Trujillo, and yet we removed him. It was part of this same thing. It was a very impersonal-type approach and probably an imperfect approach. But I simply printed it as it was written: this doctrine as presented by General Stilwell and General Lansdale and as approved by the Eisenhower era White House, at least in those days -- 1958-1959. Ratcliffe: So this was in the late Eisenhower period during his second term. Prouty: Yes. It was the Eisenhower period. I'm sure Kennedy people did not endorse it in later time. MAP's Ultimate Manifestation: Iran Ratcliffe: One other follow-up on that. You write at about the same point: Under the cover of the Bay of Pigs operation, much bigger moves were being made. All over the world the MAP training program was picking up volume and momentum. Thousands of foreigners from all 40 countries [that the U.S. was trying to establish this in] converged upon the United States for training and indoctrination. The new curriculum was either the one at Fort Bragg or like it. The Army interest in political-social-economic programs, under the general concept of "nation building", was gaining momentum. For every class of foreigners who were trained and indoctrinated with these ideas, there were American instructors and American soldiers who were being brainwashed by the very fact that they were being trained to teach this new doctrine. To them, this nonmilitary, political, social and economic theme was the true doctrine of the U.S. Army. A whole generation of the U.S. Army has grown up with this and now believes, to one degree or another, that the natural world of an army lies in this political field. . . . They believe the army is the chosen instrument in nation building, whether the subject be political-social-economic or military. In many cases, due to the great emphasis the CIA placed on training the police forces of certain foreign countries, a large number of American servicemen who were used for such training became active in what was really police work and not the scope of regular military work.[11] To me, it is so fundamental, this idea of what we saw so much of in the sixties and seventies where we sensed as a nation (some of us at least) that these police agencies in other countries that were being so repressive were somehow operating under our tutelage, and with our support and blessings. Prouty: The best model of this theory is Iran. Under this philosophy, we moved into Iran after 1949 in large numbers. The Agency was involved all over in Iran -- everywhere. The Agency founded the Iranian airline and many other organizations like that. The military had all kinds of radar detection devices up near the Caucasus Mountains for scanning into the Soviet Union. This provided the backbone of a lot of activity in Iran. But, it led to programs where we actually imported thousands of Iranian young men, selected to be leaders in Iran then and for future years, and they went to technical schools in the United States, they went to Fort Bragg, they went to all kinds of schools. They were actually given very, very useful training from their point of view and then were put back into Iran. In the later years of this program -- into the mid-seventies and on -- the CIA had enormous dossiers of people in Iran. They knew every person who would be of use in any area -- with special training in electronics or academically or medical, so on -- because we had brought them over here for some kind of training. Iran was probably the test bed for this to its extreme. The Shah was right in the middle of it. As I wrote in another article, one of the most important assignments made by Nixon when he was President was that of Richard Helms, the former Director of Central Intelligence, as Ambassador to Iran. We completely converted Iran into this type of dream, which is an offshoot of the Little Red Book of Mao Tse-tung. As a result, we got what we planted, we sowed the seeds and we got it. Now, the people in Iran who are in power have access to the same people that we've trained here. They know more about us than we do about them. This is something people don't realize about the problems we're having today. They wonder how the Iranians can do this and how the Iranians can do that. Behind the screen of this man Khomeni, all these thousands of Iranians that we've trained are totally familiar with our system -- just like Noriega in Panama. Just because there was a coup d'état, doesn't mean these people forgot the things we trained them to do. Now we're paying the price by having well-trained individuals in many of these countries who have turned that training against us or at least have said, `Look, we understand you better than you think we do. Now lay off us.' Like Noriega's saying. To a degree, even what's happening in Nicaragua is an outgrowth of this. Because, if you teach the people that the army is the chosen instrument to control the country, and then they do that, and the army does take over, they think that's what we were telling them to do. It's a very interesting and predictable development. We need to think about it very much because it has shaped what we've been doing in many countries. If you look very carefully at what the men who started this movement were writing and doing -- and I mean by that the White House report written by Stilwell and Lansdale -- then you'll begin to get a perspective of what has happened since those years, and why it happened. I think most of us would not really expect the Army to be the leavening instrument in any political scramble, like in Chile, for example. Allende was elected by the people and then he was killed by Pinochet. Which one should we, as Americans, be supporting? Pinochet is the man we trained. Allende, we said was a Communist, a Socialist, and so on. So, we reap what we sow when we create that sort of thing. That's really what I'm trying to say in the book -- that this is the way things were going within the world of the Secret Team. This also reveals that, when the Kennedy administration began to realize some of the activities that were going on -- how they had been going on -- they began to make major changes. They began to stop some of these activities. It's that kind of pressure -- that universal pressure not any given point, but that universal pressure against the system that was heavily implanted -- that led to Kennedy's death. The Secret Team: Far Beyond the Capability of the CIA Ratcliffe: It would appear so. I'm trying to catch a few final items in the remaining 20 minutes we have. One is, in terms of Kennedy, you write: "Kennedy knew that he had been badly burned by the Bay of Pigs incident and, by June of 1961 [with these NSAMs 55-57,] he and Bobby knew that he had been let down by the ST, or Secret Team." And in parentheses you say, "I carefully switch to the `ST' label here because, in all fairness to the CIA, it was more than the CIA that really created the unfortunate operation."[12] Can you us a summation of how the ST is, in your eyes, larger than the CIA, and what other groups, if such can be named, it comprises. Prouty: If you analyze the Bay of Pigs operation very carefully, you will see that its components were far beyond any capability of the Agency unless they had the very willing and active support of the rest of the government. And the rest of the government in a Secret Team mode, not in a regularly established air arm of the Air Force, nor a regularly established sea arm of the Navy, with Navy logistics. For instance, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Navy logistics behind all that was enormous. People didn't realize it, but it took place. The same thing occurred with the Bay of Pigs -- the Navy was there. They weren't called upon, they shouldn't have been called upon, but they were there. Even the State Department was somewhat involved in the political side of this: Who would follow Castro? Who would be the chosen people to follow Castro? And there are large financial expenditures in such an operation. These activities don't take place within the CIA alone. And it's important to see the CIA that way. The CIA is always merged with the rest of the government that's taking part in these actions. Because this was true over such a long period of time, there were people who were very familiar with and well-trained for these operations. Every time a covert activity came up, they were involved again. This is the Secret Team. They can carry out these activities. With the Iran-Contra exposure, you can see that the Secret Team even bred the Enterprise -- people who were making money off this deal. It went beyond even getting the job done. They were doing it so well that they had money to spare. It's exactly what I was talking about. It's almost as though we ran the Bay of Pigs operation as a commercial venture, hoping that when they took over Cuba some of the Brigade leaders would regain the casino rights and everything else would be back to normal in Cuba. As a matter of fact, I think I said something there that's ahead of myself. A stock broker called me from Washington a few days before the Bay of Pigs was planned to take place and said, "Colonel Prouty -- he just happened to know me, he didn't know my job, but he said -- Colonel, can you give me any explanation why, all of a sudden, people from the Pentagon are calling me buying sugar stock?" Sugar stock had dropped to pennies, because Castro had boycotted American sugar down there and the companies had lost a lot of money. But, all of a sudden, people who knew about the prospect of the invasion were buying sugar stock $10,000, $20,000 at a time, and sugar stock demand was going up well before the Bay of Pigs landing. They were running it as a commercial venture. There were more enterprises then. It's inevitable. If you were dealing with these things, you would do that. You can't say that the Bay of Pigs was 100% a CIA operation -- much of the government becomes involved -- any more than you can say the Vietnam war, from '45 to '65, was simply under the operational control of CIA. From '65 on the CIA was still there, more than ever, but the military moved in and the military took over. It became too big for the CIA. An Impossible Contradiction: Covert Operations Must Be Deniable Ratcliffe: Please discuss this crippling and devastating contradiction: that covert operations have to be deniable. Because the Commander-in-Chief must otherwise (if they are undeniable) accept responsibility for involvement "in an illegal and traditionally unpardonable activity."[13] Prouty: The U.S. was operating, from 1954 on, under an NSC Directive that required that any and every covert operation leave room for the U.S. government to plausibly disclaim its role, that it was not involved. Take the U-2 that went down in the Soviet Union. If you'd had a chance to study that plane, you'd find that every single instrument in the plane -- the cloth in the fabric of the pilot's clothing, the tires, everything -- had no names whatsoever -- didn't say "Goodyear Tires" or something like that. Everything in it was scrubbed clean, in order to retain deniability. We could say, `We had nothing to do with it.' Of course the U-2 of May 1, 1960 was a faulty operation. But I cite that. Aircraft that I operated, for instance, in aerial overflights to supply the rebels fighting for their lives and for their country in Tibet -- every marker on those airplanes had been changed -- cleaned off and scrubbed off. We called them "sanitized." It cost us millions of dollars to sanitize these aircraft. Because we had to deny that we had anything to do with it if the plane went down. This is in a sense ridiculous because you can't do it -- the type of planes we use were made in the United States, and so on. Ratcliffe: No one else could build a plane like that. Prouty: But a lot of people used them. We used C-130 aircraft that were employed all over the world. That made that plane effective in those operations, but if you did get caught anyone could quickly analyze it and determine who would be doing this. It comes down to the United States or one or two others at the most as the operator. That aspect of deniability was required by NSC directive. We spent millions of dollars trying to carry it out. However, once the operation gets above the bonfire stage you can't hide it. When they told us we were going to Indonesia with a covert operation and they asked me for 42,000 rifles, that was not covert. You can't deny responsibility when 42,000 American-made rifles show up in Indonesia. There's a bit of hypocrisy in that prospect. Early in the Eisenhower era when that NSC directive was written, they never intended operations to become large enough to get out of hand. Even the Bay of Pigs, as I have stressed earlier, was intended to be no more than small aerial drops, over-the-beach activities -- never an invasion. The invasion idea was started by the CIA after the Kennedy election in November of '60. So I find nothing wrong with these statements about the fact that the government attempted to truly keep these operations covert. But we haven't addressed NSAM 57 which speaks of covert activities up to a certain size that may be assigned to CIA. Above that size they may be assigned to the military. They recognized in that era that there are only certain small operations that should be assigned to CIA. After that it's a military job. You might just as well hoist the flag and say, "Americans are coming." You can't deny it, and you can't hide it. And if you have to put up with this kind of action, which is a denial of the national sovereignty of your target country no matter who it is. Whether it's Iran or Peru or Indonesia, what you are really doing is denying the sovereignty of another nation. That's criminal among the family of nations. So this is an important consideration here, but in covert activities you try to live with that. Ratcliffe: But it's such a paradoxical statement of our times: given that they are illegal, that they do violate whatever nation's sovereignty that we move within without their approval, and then that there have been these incidents where the true nature of it -- to some degree at least -- has become known and they've become compromised and can't be denied. The most blatant example recently is when Neals got North to admit that everyone except the American people knew what North knew about these things, and that the only persons North was concealing it from was from the American public. No one else. The bankrupt nature of that type of admission and how damaging it was for a "democracy" has never been addressed. There's never any analysis of the real impact or implications of what that actually means. Another example is the way we withdrew from the World Court: `We'll solve the problem by just withdrawing from the court that rules against us -- that says that we committed an illegal act when we covertly bombed the harbors of Nicaragua.' How much longer do you feel we can go on with this kind of illegality? Prouty: I have read this in other books (and I only say that to soften the blow), and I believe thoroughly that there is no longer anything called "sovereignty." It doesn't exist. We are kidding ourselves if we think sovereignty exists any longer. Consider the fact that Soviet satellites circle over our country every half-hour, obtaining almost any information they want. Go into the world of finance and the world of communications and the world of transportation, the whole global aspect: Walter Wriston himself, Mr. U.S. Banker, has written a book called Risk and Other Four-Letter Words in which he says categorically that we live in a one-world financial communications sphere and that there is no such thing as national sovereignty. We need to think about that, and understand it. We reside in that global community now. That's the way things are. The idea that there are such things as covert operations is kind of an old-time deal, it's like going back to the horse-and-buggy. I think people who want to dwell on the fact that sovereignty ought to exist because it's a blessed event, ought to realize that's gone, and I feel sorry for them. I've had a lot of people argue bitterly with me over that point, but how are you going to deny it? How's Walter Wriston going to deny it? So what we're really doing is most uncertain. It's undefined. Only recently I re-read something that I had written previously: that we are no longer going to be able to resort to warfare to settle international disputes. Nations historically, are built on warfare. Nations retain their ability to control their people on the basis of the fact that they have an enemy somewhere and they must prepare for war. That's traditional. That goes way back. But that's ended. In place of that, covert operations are one side of it, but not a very good one. The other side is the enormous power of the economy today. Here in the United States, at least up to now, we have had the advantage in economic power, just as we used to have the advantage in nuclear power. I think that this will be where the major struggles are to be fought, and I think that's why there's a realignment now coming about, because it serves no purpose for nations to sit, each on one side of the world and the other, with hydrogen bombs, and thumb their nose at each other. We both know that, barring a mistake, an absolute stupid mistake, there's no point in launching hydrogen bombs. So, a lot of the documents that the government wrote in the fifties, took place in the Kennedy era in the sixties, or that I wrote in the seventies, and so on, are really caught up by time. We live in the eighties and we're getting into the nineties. And the warfare from here on out is going to be economic. It bothers me considerably to find that for the last decade we have had a President who reduced our economic position to a terrible deficit and handed over to his successor a checkbook with an overdrawn account. This means that the United States is not going to be able to write any checks or to carry out initiatives, because we're broke. In the days when you're going to run an economic war, the worst thing that could happen is to be broke. These are the things we need to think about today. I'd just as soon give up the whole idea of The Secret Team because I don't think we're going to be calling on that kind of an operation any longer. I think the shambles of the Iran thing and the Contra thing is the end of it. I think that episode wrapped up that kind of work. It doesn't accomplish anything. And the secrecy surrounding it does just what you said: while we kept the secret from the American people, the rest of the world was laughing at us. This will be overwhelmed by our present situation in the economic world. We are broke! If we don't do something about that, we're going to have many more serious problems than we've had looking down the guns at nuclear weapons. Ratcliffe: One final question then. Looking at the momentum or the inertia of something like The Secret Team, as far as the support of the defense industry that Eisenhower warned about, which he had learned about so painfully when his Crusade for Peace had been shattered by Powers going down right before he went to see Khrushchev -- I'd like to challenge you here to give a sense of how this might come about. It seems that the inertia is still so much there. How do you get people who have for years profited and gained so much by our kind of defense/military iron triangle system to stop that? Let's consider the creation of the U-2 plane by Lockheed, largely through the doggedness of Vice President Kelly Johnson successfully selling the idea for this product to the Air Force. What about the fact that, "This was a classic example of how a project that should have been military, because it was too large to be clandestine, became covert simply as an expedient and that the reasoning was that in peacetime it could not be military because it was clandestine, so it was to be directed by the CIA, the typical Secret Team tautology."[14]? Prouty: That's a good way to put it. That's one of the things that I am saying is behind us. Because, for instance: look at the problems the government is having attempting to introduce the B-1 and B-2 bombers into some reasonable strategy. There's no role for them. There's nothing to do with them. And the fact that they're so-called "stealthy" (or at least the B-2 is supposed to be stealthy), means only stealthy in an environment of radar. It makes more noise than old bombers used to and we used to hear our old bombers before the radar was developed. You see, a lot of these things are developed to sell the product. So, the idea of going back to that world is behind us. It's not going to stop. What we're going to do for enormous profit is move into the energy and food eras. We shall spend as much time dominating the production of energy and the selling of energy products, and food production, as we used to spend on B-2 bombers and things like that. The government doesn't stand still, and we're not going to be defeated by anybody. But the weapons are going to be different. There's more talk today about Malthusianism. There's more talk today about biological warfare and ethnic cleansing. There's more talk today about mind control. These are weapons, again, but it's a different kind of war. We can say that all of these things that were written in the fifties and the sixties certainly existed, but I don't see them replicated in the nineties and after the year 2000. The big war will be over the energy supplies, transport and food supplies. Of course, with respect to energy supplies, that war started in 1973. The Arab oil embargo was given the same treatment that covert operations were. The only people that didn't know what was really going on in the Persian Gulf were the American people. We were just paying for it at the gas tank, but we didn't know why. These are very critical things, but that's going to be the future of this business. We must all keep in mind a true quote from Rudyard Kipling: "Transport is civilization." Ratcliffe: That's a good conclusion of The Secret Team. Thank you. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. The Secret Team, p.212, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp9.html#p212 2. Ibid., p.407a, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp22.html#p407a 3. Ibid., p.407b, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp22.html#p407b 4. See "Appendix E" on Page 335 for copies of all three of these NSAMs. 5. The Secret Team, pp.106-7, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp4.html#p106-7 6. Ibid., p.118, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp4.html#p118 7. Ibid., p.119, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp4.html#p119 8. Ibid., p.196, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp8.html#p196 9. Ibid., p.363, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp19.html#p363 10. Appendix III: Training Under the Mutual Security Program, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STappendix3.html 11. Ibid., p.394, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp22.html#p394 12. Ibid., p.116, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp4.html#p116 13. Ibid., pp.102-3, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp4.html#p102-3 14. Ibid., pp.154-5, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp6.html#p154-5 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. 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