-Cavet Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">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 Murders of President Diem and Kennedy About three weeks after JFK had published NSAM 263 as an official document from the White House, President Diem was killed in Vietnam. General Krulak knew about the plans for the removal of the Diems from Vietnam. It did not include killing anybody. The wife of Diem's brother, Nhu, had left Vietnam ahead of time. She was in the United States on a speaking tour -- and a very prominent speaking tour because she was called the Dragon Lady. Everybody knew where she was. Nhu was supposed to leave and meet her -- I think in Rome, because the other brother (who was a cardinal in the Catholic Church) had gone to Rome also. And that left Nhu and Ngo Dinh Diem to leave: they were going to a Parliamentary Union meeting in Belgrade and Diem had been asked to be a speaker there. So his departure from Vietnam was supposed to be the same departure any chief of state would make who was going somewhere else to deliver a lecture and make a visit. So a special airplane (a commercial airplane, not military) was being flown into Saigon that day to take him to Belgrade, with his brother. (The other brother had already left and Nhu's wife had already left.) For reasons that none of us have ever known, the two Diem brothers went to the airport, went up the stairs to the airplane and got in it, and came out again. And, to the surprise of the few people there that knew they were leaving (among them the people we had spotting this affair, that Krulak had), saw them get back into their car and go speeding back into town (where they went into the palace, the presidential palace), and suddenly realized they were alone. They were in some sense incompetent -- they didn't understand political government. Their people had been so repressive that they knew as soon as the Diems left they would be killed. The people would attack them. They hated that guard that was around Diem. So they had all run. And when the Diems went back into the palace it was empty. There was nobody there. They immediately realized what was going on, and they went into a tunnel (that had been dug for this purpose beforehand) that went under the river, over to the suburb of Saigon called Cholon. Unfortunately, at the other end of the tunnel, there were some soldiers there who had been ordered to be there, and they put them in a van and they killed them in the van. And that's how they were killed. It had nothing to do with the plan that had been laid on for them. I was in my office that afternoon and General Krulak came in and he was absolutely blanched. He said, "The Diems have been killed." He said, "I can't believe that they wouldn't follow the program we had lined up for them." He said, "But we just had a call saying that they went in the plane, came out of the plane, and went back to the city. Later it was discovered that they'd been killed." To the people that had carefully planned their movement out of the country -- and of course it was going to be a coup d'état -- maybe Diem felt that it was and didn't want to leave, or something. But he was going to be out. He was never going to come back. And maybe he sensed that, or maybe somebody had tipped him off. We can't account for it. In fact, when Krulak turned to me and talked to me about it, he said, "We'll never know what went through their heads. They should've been smarter. They should've just kept going and they'd have been out and they wouldn't have . . . " If you remember, in the time of Watergate it was discovered that the Nixon presidential advisor named Charles (Chuck) Colson had employed Allen Dulles' old-time biographer Howard Hunt (and Bay of Pigs expert) to go into the files in the White House (the confidential presidential files in the White House) and doctor those files to make it appear that Kennedy had ordered the death of Diem. That will show you how imperative it was to certain interests in Washington to make it appear that Kennedy had ordered the death of Diem. That's looking back: that was in '72, wasn't it? Ratcliffe: '71 or '72. Prouty: Looking back a decade, we find that kind of retroactive work was going on. It's quite insidious when you think about it. But, the facts are much, much different. Kennedy did not plan the death of Diem. And it was stupid, it was unfortunate. But I was right where I could hear these principals talking. I was writing documents for them, I know exactly what happened. And I think this business of being that close to the things that were going on actually played an interesting part in my own life. Because, at just about that same time, Ed Lansdale (whom I'd known since 1952 and who I'd been working with since he came back to the Pentagon in 1956, every day) came to me one day. He was still up in Mr. McNamara's office, and I was in the JCS area then. I wasn't working right in his immediate office then. But he came to me one day and he said, "Fletch, you've been working pretty hard and I've got an approval to something that might be a nice paid vacation. How would you like to go to the South Pole?" And I thought, I wouldn't mind a paid vacation -- I don't know about the South Pole -- but if someone is going to fly me down to the South Pole and all. So OK, I'd be glad to go. Then he said, "Go over to the South Pole Office on Jackson Court near the White House and talk to Mr. So-and-So." I went over there and I found out that they were planning to fly a VIP party to the South Pole and they did need a military escort officer. And I was being nominated for that, and I went to the South Pole. Actually, I had been working for that Antarctic Office since 1958-1959. I possess a Commendation, dated 1959, from them. I was out of Washington from, I think, the 10th of November until November 28th, after President Kennedy was killed -- so that I was intimate with the things that had to do with the death of Mr. Diem, but I was completely out of the scene for the things that happened in the death of President Kennedy. And it has occurred to me in the 25 years since that period that, in some way, that spells some of the pressures that were going on in Washington at that time: that it was better that I -- and people like me who were very intimate with affairs in Washington -- had to be out of the way. I was sent there as the Escort Officer for an industrial group who set in operation a nuclear power plant at McMurdo Navy Base. It was an interesting interlude. I came back from the South Pole on November 28th, 1963 and one month later I retired from the service. I went in to General Krulak and said, "General, I am through." I had been in the Pentagon nine years. The General was a bit upset. He told me he had received information from the Air Force that they were going to send me to Vietnam as the Chief of Intelligence in Saigon. I have never tried to corroborate it, but that is what he told me. He said that I was slated to become a general if I would stay on and take that job. And I have never corroborated that; it is simply what he told me. I said, "I thank you very much, General, I'm going to retire." And I retired on the 1st of January and I went to work for a private company on the 2nd of January. But that period of time, in those nine years that I have described (from 1955 until 1964), I think, are unequaled in history, at least in modern times. Because I saw unfold all of these different actions that became the Vietnam War, the death of Kennedy, and many other strange events that have never been duplicated in the United States of America. It's really very interesting. Explanation of the Office of Special Operations -- Military Services Providing Support to Government Clandestine Activities Ratcliffe: In Appendix I of your book, The Secret Team, you included a job description you said was typical for you, regardless of whether you were in the headquarters of the Air Force, the Office of the Secretary of Defense or the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.[2] I'd like you to read this for us and comment on the types of activities this generalizable job description covered for you in any of the three positions you held that were somewhat interchangeable. Prouty: From time to time, people have wondered and asked about this business that we euphemistically call "special operations" that is the military services providing support to the clandestine activities of the government, usually clandestine activities that are at least nominally under the control of the CIA. There are official papers on this, and I as said earlier that we derive the authority from the NSC Directive No. 5412.[3] In the process, the Secretary of Defense established an office called the Office of Special Operations. And I'd like to read to you verbatim really, and then describe parts of it -- what the Government felt about this kind of work; because this was a perfectly public paper in the days when I first acquired it, and it says quite a bit about the kind of activities that go on in covert operations. I believe that, at least from a policy guidance line, this would apply even to the recent things that we call the Iran hostage/Contra affair. The people were working along the same lines as this paper here. So we'll take a careful look at it. The following job description is taken from the U.S. Government Organization Manual, 1959-1960, page 143. It's a typical government definition of the term "special operations." It defines quite well the work that I was in from 1955 through 1963, whether it was with the Headquarters, U.S. Air Force, the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the Office of Secretary of Defense. Now, I will read the next words as direct quotations from this government operations manual. The Assistant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense (Special Operations) [who was General Graves B. Erskine of the Marine Corps, Retired; he was Assistant to the Secretary of Defense, Special Operations] is the principal staff assistant to the Secretary of Defense in the functional fields of intelligence, counterintelligence (except as otherwise specifically assigned), communications security, Central Intelligence Agency relationship and special operations, and psychological warfare actions. He performs functions in his assigned fields of responsibility such as: (1) recommending policies and guidance, governing the Department of Defense planning and program development; (2) reviewing plans and programs of the military departments for carrying out approved policies and evaluating the administration and management of approved plans and programs as a basis on which to recommend to the Secretary of Defense necessary actions to provide for more effective, efficient, and economical administration and operation and the elimination of duplication; (3) reviewing the development and execution of plans and programs of the National Security Agency I'll break there for a moment. Most people don't realize that the two are that closely allied: that Defense/CIA and the National Security Agency work together. And that it was this Office of Special Operations that was responsible for the reviewing, the development, and the execution of plans and programs of the National Security Agency and related activities of the Department of Defense; and (4) developing Department of Defense positions and providing for Department of Defense support in connection with special operations activities of the United States Government. And I'll break there. That means that the Department of Defense operated as effectively in clandestine operations as did any other part of the government, or even more so. It wasn't CIA all the time, or NSA all the time; actually the Department of Defense is the leader in all this work. This is what this statement is underscoring. In the performance of his functions, he [this Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations] coordinates actions, as appropriate, with the military departments and other Department of Defense agencies having collateral or related functions and maintains liaison with the Department of State, the Director of Central Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States Information Agency, and other United States and foreign government organizations on matters in his assigned fields of responsibility. In the course of exercising full staff functions, he is authorized to issue instructions appropriate to carrying out policies approved by the Secretary of Defense for his assigned fields of responsibility. And I'll break there. You see, that is what I was asked to do by General White when I was asked to write the instructions and policies under NSC 5412. And General White's authority was derived from the Secretary of Defense and we're reading that here you see, the entire military establishment. So you can see that this statement here covered everybody in the Department of Defense, which would include the Air Force and all the others, and that's why I was doing that work in 1955. In the course of exercising full staff functions, he is authorized to issue instructions appropriate to carrying out policies approved by the Secretary of Defense for his assigned fields of responsibility. He also exercises the authority vested in the Secretary of Defense relating to the direction and control of the National Security Agency and related activities of the Department of Defense. The Assistant to the Secretary of Defense (Special Operations) is appointed by the Secretary of Defense. Very important: he works for the Secretary of Defense. He is not there to do the job of someone else (such as the CIA or any other group). He is a full-time employee of the Secretary of Defense. I would cite that last line to those people who have been reading the record recently about the trial of Colonel North. Colonel North was working for the Secretary of Defense when he worked for the NSC. And people shouldn't mix that up. It's too bad that the courts and the congressional committees didn't understand that distinction. But they should read this same paper: because the military work under the Secretary of Defense when they're doing covert activities -- not for some other office. Even though they might have a desk in some other office, they are members of the military. Colonel North was paid by the Marine Corps, not by the National Security Council -- that's very important and they should keep this in mind. This is a formal statement that describes what the Office of Special Operations was doing and what it was responsible for. That's where I worked for two years, that's where General Lansdale worked for two-and-half or three years. It was the key office for the development of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) and it was the number one office for all relationships on covert activities with the CIA, with the NSC, with the White House, and with anybody else involved in this action. It isn't explained there, but in the pursuit of this kind of business, many other departments are involved. We had to work with the Treasury Department. We had to work with FAA about the movement of aircraft. Sometimes we had to work with Customs people regarding flights coming in when we could not allow Customs to board the plane. They understood, but they had to know about it. We had to have cleared people (what we called "cleared staff") there. There were thousands and thousands of people involved in the network that's described in this paper. Most people, I think, feel that the clandestine activities are 10 or 15 people running around the world performing tricks, "fun and games." It's a very large organization. In many respects all this talk about the closeness between the Office of Special Operations and the National Security Agency -- this gave us effective communications all over the world. Just like we heard during Colonel North's trial: he knew immediately when things were being done (after they had given orders to have these things done -- NSA can do that, NSA can listen in on anything, they know what's going on). That's why the direction of NSA was put under this office -- so that we would have a uniform, worldwide system for clandestine operations. It's a very formal program. The only area that isn't stated in that paper (and when I used to work there I used to feel rather strongly that it wasn't really omitted but it wasn't specifically cited) was the intricacies we had in handling money. If you're going to steal money from a bank, you have to know where you're going to put it afterwards. Money is very hard to hide. Money is very hard to steal. When you're working in an organization like the Defense Department or the U.S. government, it is extremely difficult to move sums of money because the bureaucrats all know where that money ought to be. You don't take money that is in the Department of Agriculture and spend it in the Department of Commerce. You just don't do it. Well you don't take money that was ostensibly appropriated for the CIA and spend it in the Defense Department or vice versa. The Economy Act of 1932: Handling The Money To Run Covert Operations As intricate as anything we did in the days we were in this kind of work was handling money. I spent more time, on these papers that I prepared for the methodology of handling covert operations,[4] in devising the money trails as anything else. That's why I feel in this current business about the Iran-hostage exchange, when you hear these top people talking about the use of the Economy Act of 1932 -- they don't say the year -- they just say the Economy Act, what they are really talking about is this very secret money channel that we established for actual covert operations. It works all right. It's not described in this document[5] at all. But it was a key to how this whole business of covert operations worked. You've got to pay people all the time. For example, you've got to buy helicopters. One of the situations we had: we had planes going all over the world all the time. The usual system when you're flying an aircraft all over the world is to use a credit card just like the airlines do. The pilot buys thousands of gallons of fuel and puts it on the credit card. But how do you put a credit card on an "Air America" CIA airplane that really belonged to the Air Force? And, in the end, how do you pay the bills? We created a system for this. We created a system where every single credit card turned in on these planes in the clandestine business around the world would arrive at a certain computer center at Dayton, Ohio. From that computer center in Dayton, it would fall into a certain box and we'd pay those bills. Then we'd turn right around and charge CIA -- but we'd do it on internal U.S. Air Force books so nobody knew it. Thus we could follow the movement of every single airplane. If you can't do that, you can't run covert operations. As you heard Colonel North trying to explain what they did, and he can't do it -- it's because the system broke down. They had trouble with the system, they need to go back and rethink the system. A very intricate system. Ratcliffe: In other words, that level of indirection was essential to cover what the money was really being used to pay for. Prouty: Yes. The money we're talking about is nothing but numbers: so many dollars in the Defense budget that moved into the CIA budget, or vice versa and so many dollars from another budget moving into this budget. We never touched a dollar, we never asked the Sultan of Brunei or anyone else for a couple of million bucks as they say the "Iran-Contra" operators did -- that's utterly ridiculous! If you're going to help some young kids in Honduras that are called the "Contras," you don't go around borrowing millions of dollars to give to some ex-Nicaraguan in a villa in Palm Beach! That's what the Iran-Contra scheme was doing. Those "cover story" operators were millionaires under the Somoza regime. They'd like to be back again being millionaires under another regime. You don't send them millions of dollars in checks and say, "Hey, spend this money buying grenades." The ridiculous thing about all this -- how do you take grenades out of an Army supply depot? How do you get some Army supply sergeant to give you a truckload of grenades? You can't say to him, `Hey, I'm going to take these down and give them to the Contras.' The Army supply sergeant won't give you anything. You have to have a letter of authority and it has to look like every other letter he's ever seen. You don't sell them for $3 a piece to the Contras! You see how ridiculous all this stuff is? During that Iran-Contra fiasco, if we just had a chance to take this one directive, and explain it to Judge Gesell or to Prosecutor Walsh and let them know what the facts of life are, they would have ended that problem in a few days. They wouldn't even need the jury. It's just ridiculous the way this has grown. Ratcliffe: Isn't it also true that the whole scam of that trial is that, if there was to be any trial at all that was correct, it would have been a military trial? -- since he was in the Operations as a -- Prouty: We have to look at it several ways. If they reached the point in coming down the levels, the first thing to know is to find out who really made the decision and whether he had that authority. It wasn't Ollie North; it wasn't Poindexter; it wasn't McFarland. They all worked for people. So you have to go to the people they worked for and say, "Who made the decision?" The man who said this Iran-Contra operation was done under the Economy Act made the decision. Because, by saying it was done under the Economy Act, what he is doing is opening the doors of the secret supply channel, which is worth tens of millions of dollars. He had to have the money for it -- meaning the money in the federal budget -- not cash on the barrel, and not cash he got from the King of Saudi Arabia. He made the decision to release the missiles, and not to sell them to somebody -- in exchange for hostages. When you exchange the missiles for hostages, you don't get any money; the hostages are the money, you exchange for hostages. If somebody kidnapped my dog and said he wanted $100, I'd give them the money and I'd take the dog. That's the deal! The whole situation in this contrived Iran-Contra situation -- from the point when McFarlane went over to Teheran with a cake and a Bible, the whole thing, right there, was explaining itself as a weird, mixed-up exercise. You don't do clandestine exercises that way. There was something terribly wrong with it when it started with a cake and a Bible. I bought that present for Diem that we mentioned earlier to put on his desk because Lansdale was the guy that was going there; well even that felt pretty strange, to be using U.S. money to put a trinket on President Diem's desk. But it wasn't going to hurt anybody. But this Iran-Contra deal is the biggest aberration on covert operation I've ever heard of. It simply is not a covert operation at all. Somebody was just handling a lot of money, and Meese created the meaningless name for that game, "Iran-Contra", that was just contrived. Ratcliffe: What's your sense of the most likely explanation for how things have gone so awry? Prouty: It's simple. The Iraqis have fought the Iranians since 1981. And in that period the Iraqis have released data that this warfare cost them $60 billion. I'm sure the Iranians fought as hard as the Iraqis did. The Iranians were using U.S. military hardware, because most of their army and navy are supplied with things made in the United States. When the equipment is made in the United States -- like engines or parts -- you have to buy them from the United States; nobody else makes that specific military equipment, at least not identical. So you have to buy it from the United States. So, I believe (without too much concern about the exact record, or the figures) that it must have cost the Iranians about $60 billion to fight the Iraqis. If it did, it means the Iranians purchased (from somebody) parts made in the United States that belonged to the U.S military (or the military suppliers) worth $60 billion. Not a few million. Not a cake and a bible. Sixty billion dollars. They don't want to talk about it. So they'd rather talk about the cake and the bible and the Contras. That's the role Mr. Meese created to divert the people from the $60 billion and talk about the Contras. When you're talking about the Contras, everything that happened in Iran is quiet. One was supposed to balance the other. If you go back and look at the newspapers, the Iranian/Contra problem began with a little newspaper saying that weapons from the United States had been exchanged for hostages. That was the problem -- only that. Then, when Mr. Meese went poking around in the papers in the White House, he says he found a memo that the money from that exchange was going to the Contras. He made some funny statements. There's no money from the exchange -- not from that exchange -- and there was no need of giving money to the Contras. But every eye and ear of the members of the Congressional hearings turned to the Contras, and they forgot Iran from that time on. Mr. Meese's gambit succeeded. As simple as that. Then we get people who have other interests -- and I make no brief for them; but people like the Christic Institute -- who amplified on this deal. The next thing you know, everybody's looking at Nicaragua instead of Teheran. Well, that covers up the $60 billion deal we played with Iran. There's your problem. Clarifying the Role of the National Security Agency (NSA) Ratcliffe: Regarding a statement in what you quoted: you were saying the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Special Operations was in charge of reviewing the plans and activities of the NSA -- the NSA being the electronic eyes and ears of the world for the U.S. Did this mean you would review plans of the NSA of where they would be listening or what they would be looking for? Prouty: Let's keep something in mind here: there is a lot of misunderstanding about the role of the National Security Agency (NSA). It is eyes and ears -- as a purely technical or mechanical job. It's like the water company. You have to have a lot of pipes and then the water can come in your house or somebody else's house. But the pipes have to be there first. If they want to meter the water coming into your house, they put a meter out there and they read the meter. Communications is a flow of information something like that. There are communications channels existent all over the world. It's all floating around out there in space, all vibrating away in space, perfectly normal and in accordance with the laws of physics. If you want to listen in, you use a radio, or you improve radios to all kinds of capabilities by using computers. And that equipment can monitor any emission that's in the air, or even in the ground. There are programs that count the vibrations in the earth. They have things sunk near roads that can count the number of trucks that pass down that road every day. They can tell you the weight of the truck by the way it bounces, and so on. The NSA is so good at all of this emission business, whether it's radio waves or whatever kind of waves; they can tell you when a power transmission line is carrying the normal load of electricity or an increased load or when it's turned off. They can tell you when a nuclear power plant far out in the back of Western China near the Mongolian border is operating or not operating. The NSA can do that. These are purely physical things that they do with instrumentation and enhanced with computers. But they're not covert activities. There's a difference. They're in the pipes, somebody tells them what to do and they do it. The other side of it is, they do so damn much that you can't read it out. They've got warehouses of data. So they learn to rotate it, and reuse it, and all that. But they let the computers scan it, and the computers pull stuff off by signature devices that can read voices, read numbers -- all kinds of things -- until they get the data they are seeking. But even then, they need direction. They need to be told: `You heard so-and-so talk on the phone last week. Find that voice again and let us know what he says next time he makes a phone call'. And whether he's in Tokyo or whether he's in Singapore, they'll find that voice again and the computer will identify it by its code signatures, voice signatures, and they'll put the message out. That's NSA. So NSA needs direction. General Erskine was charged with the responsibility for giving them that direction when required. It makes a lot of sense. But it is entirely different from the kind of direction you might have working with CIA, where the CIA is an independent agency and able to do any and all kinds of activities that human beings can devise which are not the sorts of tasks you can put under direction. So the CIA activities are much different from the NSA activities. One is sort of a numbers game, and the other is akin to dealing with poetry -- you never know what's going to be next. It's an art. It's a skill. As Mr. Dulles wrote in his own biography, it's The Craft of Intelligence. It's much different. Abolishing the OSO and Moving Special Operations Into the JCS Things came together in this Office of Special Operations, where the CIA and the NSA enhanced each other. As such, it was a real fine structure -- that OSO Office should never have been abolished. It was a very important office; they made a big mistake. That's when control over our foremost intelligence agencies began to go downhill, when they abolished OSO. The Defense Intelligence Agency was established at the same time in early 1961. Ratcliffe: OSO was run by General Erskine? Prouty: Yes, Erskine. He had been in that assignment for nine years. I was his Chief Air Force Officer for Special Operations. He had an Army Officer and a Navy Officer in similar functions. His Deputy was Lansdale, who was with CIA. And he had other people from CIA -- a fellow named Frank Hand and some others. But I was his Chief Air Force Officer and I had headed a similar Office of Special Operations in the Air Force for the previous five years. Ratcliffe: Then, when you went in 1962 through 1963 into the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, your title and position was still dealing with Special Operations. Prouty: Yes. I set up that new office to retain that capability of dealing with the CIA and its covert operations when they closed down OSO. When they closed down the OSO, other work, like the NSA, was managed through other offices after that. McNamara dispersed them into different offices. The Office of Special Operations, the covert support, was put into JCS, and I worked under the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But it stayed -- the role was identical, as far as that part was concerned. Ratcliffe: I thought there was some point when you were involved with doing for the other branches of the Defense Department what you had done for the Air Force, in terms of acting as this liaison. Prouty: That was with JCS. Then I had a senior Army man, a senior Navy man and I acted as a senior Air Force man so we had all the services. I had a Marine General, and I worked for a Marine, so we had all the services covered by being in the JCS. I think that was the proper way to run that. I agreed very much with General Wheeler and Mr. McNamara when they asked me to go there, because I felt that really was -- at certain times in my work with the Air Force, we would collide with the other services. The Agency would, in effect, bargain with us. Take the beginning of the Bay of Pigs: the Agency went to the Navy and asked for initial support in Panama for the Bay of Pigs operation. The Navy wouldn't do it. So they came to the Air Force, and we did it. We did the Navy's role really. That's not good -- that kind of colliding on these jobs. If the Navy had a good reason not to do it, we should have dropped it right there. In the JCS we'd put it all on the same desk and we wouldn't have that kind of a mix-up. That was a better way to run this operation. Ratcliffe: But you also said you felt it was a mistake to have abolished the office as it stood in the Office of the Secretary of Defense? Prouty: Yes. In the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where they were higher, he also had DIA and NSA. And that was very important; they should have kept those together. And he also had the State Department liaison and the White House liaison. Ratcliffe: Alright. You were just commenting about this paper. Prouty: Yes. It's very good to talk from this government publication. It describes the roles and the function and the policy of this Office of Special Operations. If you divide those functions, then some central authority is not operating to go from one line across the other line. For example, if we wanted to work with the NSA. NSA knew we had the same function with CIA, or that we had the same functions with the State Department, the same responsibilities in the White House. So that we could bridge all of these organizations together. And from the dominant position of the Secretary of Defense, we could make sure that NSA and CIA -- and when necessary, the State Department and the White House -- all knew the same things. We were not working at cross-purposes. It was a very effective build up that began again with this NSC 5412 paper back in 1954, and placed under General Erskine's control and supervision. Now if that same policy was being performed today -- by what we see again in the Iran hearings -- I don't think they would have had all this misunderstanding about who was doing what. Because this was very clear. All we had to do was, if I ever had a question about whether or not I should do something that the CIA asked me to do, I had a very simple answer to that myself. I would go to the Secretary of Defense, who kept a record of his NSC actions, and I would say: `Mr. Gates, did the NSC approve this operation (the CIA had just called me to perform)?' He'd look at his record and he'd say, `Yes. Day before yesterday we approved it. Go ahead.' I wouldn't be in the quandary that Ollie North and his associates find themselves in. There was no ambiguity. We knew. If something came up that involved the support of NSA, NSA could say, `Why are you asking us to do that?' I would say, `Well, we have had a meeting with the CIA. The Secretary of Defense says we'll do this.' And then we would do it. When we needed coordination with the ambassador in India, or the ambassador in Thailand, we could go to the State Department as the legal representative of the Secretary of Defense and say: `We have an operation that involves CIA, that involves NSA, that's going to take place in India, and we just want to let you know.' Fine. Then we don't have anybody stumbling over each other's toes. Right now, this question of whether Mr. Bush, when he went to Honduras, did this or did that -- we didn't get into that kind of problem, because it had been decided by everybody before we did it. This was a very good system for this kind of secret operation. The other way to say it is: the lack of it leads to the problems that we have seen now. I think that it was a serious mistake for the Secretary of Defense to abolish the OSO and let these responsibilities go separately on their own, as they appear to be doing now. In order to create another OSO, President Reagan brought that responsibility up into the White House under the NSC. Well, they're not staffed to do any of this. In fact, Poindexter, North, McFarlane, and Earl are all military officers on duty. They all belong in the Pentagon. They don't belong over there in the White House. They made a bad mistake when they failed to see the necessity to keep this team work working as it was between '54 and '64 and probably for several years after that. Ratcliffe: Who abolished the OSO -- McNamara? Prouty: McNamara. It happened almost inadvertently because, again, McNamara was new. He'd only been there a few months. And General Erskine, who had been in that job longer than any person had ever been Assistant Secretary -- it was time for him to retire. He was an elderly man at the time. I think just because Erskine was leaving, McNamara had not had the experience with the system -- and I think there was no suitable successor -- Lansdale wasn't the type of man to be the boss. Lansdale was a good operator, but not the man to be the boss. First of all, Lansdale was a CIA agent. They also were setting up DIA at the same time -- I think a little bit overwhelmed by all these things -- and they didn't think that losing this whole package was going to be so important. I fought pretty hard to keep my package together, and I was successful. I was glad to get it into JCS. But I severely missed the ability to go to the NSA people, or to the State Department or the White House, to coordinate all this. I still coordinated with the CIA but, you see, not with the others. So the system began to break down when it was divided. Ratcliffe: You were unable to because it wasn't within your scope of contacts as easily as it had previously been? Prouty: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not get these functions when he got the function of Special Operations. He did not get these other functions. He only got Special Operations. And personalities have a tremendous impact. General Lemnitzer, was, as far as I'm concerned, an ideal Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and was not interested in Special Operations. He thought the military should be military: no fun and games. It was just that way -- it's his military strength, just the way he'd act. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. Copies of NSAM 263, the "Report of McNamara-Taylor Mission to South Vietnam", NSAM 273, as well as some of their primary supporting documents, are included together in Appendix B. 2. The Secret Team, Appendix I, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STappendix1.html 3. See Appendix C. 4. "Military Support of the Clandestine Operations of the United States Government" written in 1955. See Military Experiences, Part II, page 42. 5. U.S. Government Organization Manual, 1959-1960, page 143. See page 76. --[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 & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soap-boxing! 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