-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> ----- Clandestine Operations: Out of Control If Not Directed by the National Security Council Prouty: What we've been talking about emphasizes the very great importance of the National Security Council. If the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Defense can't handle the CIA, then nobody can. If they permit the funding from Congress or any other really covert work to put CIA into areas that they didn't approve, it's their fault and nobody else's. This is one of the serious aspects about this recent Iran situation. It seems as though Congress wants to accept the fact that Poindexter, McFarlane, North and all those men were doing things that the NSC didn't approve. And they are legitimizing that which is terrible -- really, for the future, is a terrible thing to put up with. We've got a law that says if you're going to get into clandestine operations, it can only be done at the direction of the National Security Council. And here we have the men who were members of the National Security Council -- Reagan, Bush, Weinberger, and Schultz -- all walking off and saying, `We had nothing to do with it.' Now that, for the next era, is going to create enormous problems, even worse than it did for Reagan. If Congress doesn't recognize what's happening, they had better do so pretty soon or else they're going to find covert operations going on that nobody knows anything about because what they are doing then is regularizing what I said in my book: that there exists a Secret Team that is out of control. And now by doing nothing they have regularized it. That's the danger. If they don't keep the National Security Council directing these organizations, they'll never get the genie back in the bottle. Ratcliffe: Which is so curious since we heard such a hue and cry during the hearings in the summer of '87 regarding, `they're trying to take too much power away from the executive. The President needs to have more power here in these operations.' In fact, he already had the power with the NSC. Prouty: And he denies he used it. The President says, `I've got nothing to do with what those fellows were doing.' Mr. Bush has said `I didn't do anything down in Honduras,' or `I didn't do anything when I met with the Israelis.' It's appalling, because if Congress is going to accept that, they're denying the role of the National Security Council and then they're permitting almost anybody else in the government to run covert operations. Now that's something else people need to understand about covert operations. We talk about the CIA being in charge of covert operations. Almost any branch of the government gets into covert operations. And they do it in a team fashion. That's why I called it The Secret Team. Because I saw just as many people working in covert operations in the Customs Service, in the Treasury Service, even in FAA sometimes, as I did when we saw CIA people and defense people working. It just depends on what type of operation you're in or who wants it done. It's not the CIA all the time, although they all get together and say it was the CIA. The CIA might just have had a representative in there. Or the CIA would provide its special communications and its other facilities that they have -- as we heard in the case of Ollie North and the others -- they had these special communications devices and all that. But other people were doing the job. So we have to learn a lot more about how these things are done. But if we deny and cancel out the role of the National Security Council, we're going to be in very, very deep trouble. There will be no one in charge at all. Four Categories of Military Personnel Employed by CIA Ratcliffe: A very central point, it seems, in The Secret Team book was your qualifying people who were working either within the military or then in a position inside the Central Intelligence Agency. Regarding this term "military," please clarify your use throughout the book, of the four examples of different types of military personnel you define. Prouty: In ordinary every day agency business, there is a need for a close relationship between the agency and the military departments. So hundreds of experienced intelligence officers are assigned to work with the CIA. The distinction is they're paid by their service -- they are under the control of their service commanders -- but they sit in a CIA office and work with the CIA for the purpose of coordinating intelligence. They bring to the CIA certain assets that it doesn't have and the CIA exposes them to certain assets of theirs. So they work together. That's one group of the "team". Next, there are certain military officers whom the CIA needs to have for its own purposes. Let's say pilots. That's one career field: helicopter pilots, aircraft pilots, and so on. So, the CIA pays the Department of Defense for we'll say a hundred pilots who will be assigned to CIA -- the CIA reimburses the Department of Defense for those men and strictly speaking, they work as employees of the CIA. The Defense Department, if it wishes, could hire a hundred more pilots within its budgetary limits, you see, because it has this money from the CIA. In every case of that the man who is assigned is a volunteer. He doesn't have to go. He's not being assigned by the military; he's accepting an offer from CIA. What we do is we keep dual records because we don't want to penalize either his military service or his retirement benefits and all that. He's still a government employee. This is a very technical area we start getting into. But that's a second group. They take these people over there, as they do people from the Department of Agriculture, or as they do from FAA -- they need certain other assets which they pay for. Then we have an extensive group of people in the reserve. They can be called to active duty -- they can be employed as civilians by CIA and then, with the permission of the Defense Department, called to active duty. And of course they're paid for by the CIA, they work for the CIA, they're CIA employees. But only in certain jobs are they permitted, by agreement with the Defense Department, to put on their uniforms, carry defense I.D., and work perhaps in a friendly country or maybe in a marginal country. In this manner we have organizations in Athens, in Australia, in many countries around the world where military officers are assigned, but the CIA is using their capability. So there's a third group. Finally (and this is a pretty rare case, but it existed), there are certain CIA men who have to be assigned to certain countries for specific duties, but there is no way the CIA can tell that country, `Look, I'm sending you a CIA agent.' Sometimes they say, This man is with the State Department, or a Foreign Service officer, but very frequently would say, This man is a military officer. And with the approval, with the cognizance of the Defense Department, they take Mr. X and call him Commander Jones and he's made a Navy commander, and ostensibly he's a Navy commander. He's never been on the military rolls before, and he works for CIA. So you can have those four different roles simultaneously, and they exist in large numbers, thousands -- during my day, I think we had over 5,000 people in these various categories -- and they're effective around the world. In fact I can remember a meeting when President Diem in Saigon said, `You know I have a real problem here.' He said, `I have all these generals, who are military generals, but I find out they're really CIA. How do I know who's CIA . . . ?' In his country, there actually were more CIA generals than there were military generals. He had a right to the question. The same has happened in other countries, but usually it's kept pretty quiet and the people are there for specific jobs. Generally there are no abuses of the situation. We know what's going on and, at least in the days when I was close to this situation, we were kept very well informed in the Defense Department about these. We knew these agreements existed and the people were taken care of very carefully and we kept it on the books under the regulatory base of reimbursement. We made them pay us money for these people when they were our military people. Final Chapter in the History of War Making: Going From Offense to Defense Ratcliffe: Stepping back for a minute to this idea of the shift in government policy after World War II from offense to defense. You spoke on page 126-127 about this in terms of the positive action that war, the idea of war had held in the past. Quoting from the book here you write: What began perhaps as an honest effort to alert this country to the fact that the Soviet Government did in fact have the potential to unleash the secrets of the atom and thus to build atomic bombs, gradually became a powerful tool in the hands of the irresponsible and the agitators. . . . The first great fault with the drift of opinion at that time became evident in the very shift of emphasis with regard to the national military establishment. Throughout our history the idea of war had been treated as a positive action. War was the last resort of a nation, after all means of diplomacy had failed, to impress its might and its will upon another. Throughout our proud history we never had faced war as something passive or re-active. But somehow in that postwar era this nation began to think of war as defense alone. In other words, in this defense philosophy we were not telling the world that the most powerful nation in the world was showing its magnanimity and restraint; we were saying that we would defend only. To the rest of the world that meant we were going to play a passive role in world affairs and that we were passing the active role, and with it the initiative, to others -- in this case to the men in the Kremlin. We not only said this as we disestablished our traditional War Department but we have done it throughout the intervening twenty-five years by developing the capability to search out the action of an enemy and then by responding. This defensive posture of our military and foreign policy has been a terrible mistake, and it opened the doors for the newborn intelligence community to move in and take over the control of U.S. foreign and military policy.[8] Could you discuss the idea, stated above, that "Throughout our history the idea of war has been a positive action." Prouty: I think that's a powerful concept and we have to talk about that. To have the greatest and most powerful nation on earth, and in the forties when we were the dominant power because we were the only ones with the atom bomb and the only ones with the means to deliver the atom bomb effectively all over the world, we all of a sudden went into this guise of defense when we talked about our military. A clear example of it during the Vietnam War was General Westmoreland's goals of search and destroy. Search -- you're looking for something. If you find it -- you destroy it. It isn't destroy -- it isn't attack. He wasn't on the offense. He was looking for something to shoot at, to destroy as a defensive mechanism. It affected even what I would call "small wars" that way. We were on the defense. He had no objective in Vietnam. He had no place to go in Vietnam and win the war. I've said in earlier elements of this discussion with you that the first officer I reported to the first day of my military duty in July 1941 happened to be a captain named Creighton W. Abrams, who became Chief of Staff of the Army and head of our forces in Vietnam after Westmoreland. I know this from friends of mine -- I've known General Abrams all my life -- he's from my hometown: when President Johnson told him that he was going to be the commander in Vietnam, President Johnson with his gung-ho attitude said, `Now Abe, you've got 550,000 men in the army out there -- all you need to do the job. You've got the strongest navy assembled in the world -- the 7th Fleet. And you've got an air force that has delivered more bombs than in all of World War II. Now by God, Abe, go out and do it.' I've been told that Abrams, or one of his immediate staff, turned to the President and said, `Mr. President, would you want to define the word it for us. What is it that if we do it will win that war from your position as our commander-in-chief?' The President put his arm around Abrams' shoulder and led him to the door of the Oval Office -- sent him Saigon. There was no it in the Vietnam War. That was the problem. When General Krulak, the very able Marine commander, became chief of all Marines in the Pacific, he devised a war plan that would move the forces forward, strongly fortified with native forces, people who were imbued with the idea of fighting for their country, to march on Hanoi and take over that city and end the war. He could not get approval for that plan from the President and from Averill Harriman who at that time was serving as the Assistant Secretary of State for Far East Affairs, even though all the military agreed -- the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mr. McNamara, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, CINCPAC, Admiral Sharp -- all the military agreed with this plan. But Averill Harriman, a civilian, and President Johnson, a civilian, imbued with the idea of `we're on the defense,' couldn't see that and they denied General Krulak the permission or the direction to go and do it. That's making an example out of the statements, but, you see, that's what happens. Warfare, probably best defined by Clauswitz is an all-out action of a certain country. It is total action; it's not half-way, it's not divided, it's not graduated -- it's total. Well, you can't make total defense. You have to make total offense, even if you're in a defensive position -- if you're in a siege in a fort, you'll be thinking about offense because you're thinking of getting out of there -- you're going to die if you stay there. Offense is the core of war. Clauswitz lists nine principles of war that have been the same ever since men were throwing stones at each other on up to atom bombs. The primary principle of war is the objective. If you don't know what you're doing, you've got no business going to war. That is the antithesis of the idea of having a Department of Defense. The Threat of Nuclear Weapons: Making War Planning Obsolete This is very important for our country. We don't know why we have a military. In fact, when President Reagan spoke about having weapons in space, he called it the Strategic Defense Initiative, putting two opposite words together: the initiative and the defense. The defense initiative: the words don't even go together. It's like having a cat-dog. You can't do it. This is how bad the thinking about warfare has become in this country. It isn't because people have become less able -- it's because they are unable to assimilate the power and the threat of nuclear weapons into war planning. Today, the power and the threat of biological weapons, such as AIDS -- AIDS is a weapon and don't forget it. It was developed by the Defense Department and it's a weapon. People need to know that and they should never forget it. It is a biological weapon created by the Defense Department, funded by Congress -- that's all a matter of record. It is not a disease that came out of some cell or somewhere else by mistake. This is why people don't know how to assimilate the idea of warfare. They don't know what to do with hydrogen bombs that can erase a whole city in seconds. They don't know what to do with AIDS as a weapon. It gets away and they can't stop it. That's the basic problem we're having today when we talk about warfare. We have forgotten how war is waged and defense is not the way to wage a war. Ratcliffe: How would you see an offensive, positive action-based War Department operate in the world today? Prouty: Because of the power of weapons, including some that we only talk about and haven't used yet, there is no way to wage war. Man is too puny a beast to cope with hydrogen bombs -- there's no way you can do it. You can destroy the earth, but that's not winning a war. So, when you ask me to define that, we can still fight; we can still make victory; we can still go on the offense, but we will do it economically. And we are doing it economically. The first battle of the new kind of war was called the Arab Oil Embargo. We made the entire world pay tribute to the people who possess petroleum -- and it's quite a battle. It separates the winners and the losers, but that's the new battle. The second battle is being prepared and it will be the battle over food. This blends in with the idea that increasingly we hear of Malthusianism. We are beginning to agree, or to permit, the concept of genocide because there are too many people on earth. Well, that fits in with this next battle that's coming up. Petroleum, in a sense, is a luxury. You can walk to work; you don't have to drive to work. But when the battle becomes the battle for food, there are no alternatives. You have to have food. War still is on. You see, people's minds are still ready to fight. Terrorism is a function of this, but terrorism is not war. Terrorism is mosquitoes and you kill mosquitoes if you can. But food becomes a weapon of war and there is no way we can have a war anymore. War is done -- when you're talking about divisions, battleships, bombers -- because of hydrogen bombs. Ratcliffe: Would there be any way through the thicket, with the benefit of hindsight, that you would see possible such a form of a department of government having been retained and maintained in the years immediately after World War II with all of the accompanying pressures and transformations of that time? I suppose the answer would be "no" because of the nuclear capabilities. Prouty: The leading commanders, immediately after Hiroshima, had no trouble in seeing that if you replicated that around the world, you'd just do it until the world was ashes. The Russians first perfected the hydrogen bomb -- remember, the Russians initiated the hydrogen bomb, perfected it first; we did it second. We knew they had exploded a weapon, a device, equal to about 50 megatons. That device is so powerful that it not only destroys an enormous part of Earth and puts radiation over a larger part, lethal radiation, but it actually blows a hole through the atmosphere above the earth and goes out into space somewhere. It's beyond control on Earth entirely. Our leaders recognized that fact as far back as the forties and early fifties. Ever since then, our Presidents, including Eisenhower, could not visualize or even see the business of going to war anymore. The Korean War was simply a kind of war game. When MacArthur really began to move, they called him back. The Vietnam War was even worse than that; there were no attacks, no moves anywhere. Anloa Valley, a very hostile area in the heart of Vietnam, was captured eight times by our forces, and once they captured it, they had no reason to keep it so they walked away. Then it got hostile again -- we captured it again. That's the way war's being fought today. War now is outmoded entirely, but I don't think many people are ready to accept that. But if I were teaching evolution of warfare today at Yale University, I would put the closing chapter on war and I would simply end with the explosion of the hydrogen bomb -- just say "there it is." Ratcliffe: That's it. Prouty: It doesn't mean you can't fight and shoot people. We've got automatic rifles on the streets now. I'm not saying people aren't going to be killed, but we are not going to have a war between country A and country B effectively anymore if hydrogen weapons are involved. Iraq and Iran can fight to exhaustion; notice they didn't go anywhere. They fought each other for, what is it, six or seven years? They didn't go anywhere, didn't do anything, except kill each other. If either one had had nuclear weapons, they would have had to end the war, because they couldn't live with such weapons. Ratcliffe: Discuss the significance of, as you write, "[the] schism between those who believed in the traditional school of national planning and overt diplomacy and those who believed in a passive role of reaction to a general enemy (Communism)", that began after World War II, and how, "This latter school would operate in response to intelligence inputs, without plans and without national objectives, would hide everything in secrecy, and would justify its actions in all instances as being anti-Communist."[9] Prouty: We've been talking a bit about that. It's very important. It used to be very interesting, in the period of the fifties, to go to SHAPE headquarters in Europe -- the head of the NATO forces -- and to work with the war plans people there. I was in the Plans Division of Air Force. Although I was doing the clandestine work, I was immersed in the plans work, day after-day, for years. I would go to the War Plans sections in NATO, and you could see that there was no war plan that called for a war like World War II. What I mean by that is an all out war where you take a general like General Patton and say, `Destroy the German forces, bring the country to its knees,' which he could do. In a modern war plan, if you wanted to destroy, we'll say East Germany, you would just push a few buttons and some rockets would fly over there and the nuclear weapons would fall and you would say `what's next?' That's the fact of what we are dealing with now. So it was interesting to see in this transition period of the fifties that some people began to realize this was the position we were now in, and the war plans had no place to go. Then over here in the U.S., the people who were the officers that I described earlier, working for the CIA, were saying, `Yes, but we need to fight Communism. We can go in there and stop this insurgency. We'll run a counter-insurgency program.' It was the CIA that took the special forces who were designed to do post-strike work in a nuclear war and gradually moved special forces over into the civic action/counterinsurgency side of the business. They realized that if there was going to be any activity, they could promote that activity their way -- as counterinsurgency or covert operations, covered in secrecy. But, this was far removed from warfare. Yet it has been a very lethal activity going all the way up to the Vietnam War. Once you start a fire, there's no telling how far it's going to burn. You just keep throwing more fuel on the flames and it'll burn. Creating a Manichaean Devil to Justify Spending $6 Trillion for a Cold War Ratcliffe: There is a very philosophical passage where you discuss the manifestation of the Manichaean devil in the nuclear age: Those who believed that our only road to salvation lay in greater stockpiling of atomic bombs, those who argued that it must be the hydrogen bomb, and those few who said that it must be both, all perhaps without common intent, began to create the idea of the "enemy threat." It was coming. It was inevitable. The things that have been done since that period in the name of "anti-enemy" would make a list that in dollars alone would have paid for all the costs of civilization up to that time, with money to spare. Such an enemy is not unknown. Man has feared this type of enemy before. It is a human, and more than that, it is a social trait, to dread the unknown enemy. This enemy is defined in one context as the Manichaean Devil. Norbert Weiner says, "The Manichaean devil is an opponent, like any other opponent, who is determined on victory and will use any trick of craftiness or dissimulation to obtain this victory. In particular, he will keep his policy of confusion secret, and if we show any signs of beginning to discover his policy, he will change it in order to keep us in the dark." The great truth about this type of enemy is that he is stronger when he is imagined and feared than when he is real. One of man's greatest sources of fear is lack of information. To live effectively one must have adequate information. It was in this great conflict that the National Security Act of 1947 was brewed. And man's demand for information pervaded and surmounted almost every other move he made. Thus a great machine was created. All of the resources of this country were poured into a single Department of Defense -- defense against the great Manichaean Devil which was looming up over the steppes of Russia with the formula of the atomic bomb in one hand and the policy of World Communism in the other. Our statesman foresaw the Russian detonation of the atomic bomb in 1949 and the concurrent acceleration toward the hydrogen bomb as soon thereafter as possible; so they created the Atomic Energy Commission in January of 1947 and then the Defense Department in September 1947 and gave both of them the eyes and ears of the CIA to provide the essential information that at that time was really the paramount and highest priority. The AEC was ordered to achieve both goals -- the second to-none atomic bomb stockpile and the hydrogen bomb, and the DOD was ordered to create the global force that would defend this country against the giant of the Soviet Union and all other nuclear powers.[10] Discuss the significance of "the transfer in January 1947 of the great nuclear weapon technology to the new Atomic Energy Commission."[11] Prouty: We'll start with that final question because it's an important one. The atom bomb, as you know, was developed under the Manhattan Project which was part of the Army during the War. It was obvious that, at the end of the war, there would have to be a continuing development with atomic weapons, fission weapons; that there would also probably be peace time use of these weapons, and that the ability to manufacture these rare materials -- plutonium and the like -- for the weapons required an enormous facility and would have to be run by someone. Yet, it was inadvisable to keep that in the Army. It was felt that this should be under national control, more or less for coordination, almost like the CIA, but to coordinate all this. So they moved this business of nuclear weapons into the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and they continued the development of the fission weapon. At the time they were dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there were two different types more or less competing with each other for perfection. But there was a lot of research still to do. Finally they got the atom bomb from a monster that had to be put in a B-29 down to where you could carry it around in the back of a Volkswagen. They improved it. And enlarged its explosive power as well. In due time the hydrogen bomb was created which now can be any size you want. You can make a hydrogen bomb as big or little as you want. So this was put under the Atomic Energy Commission as well as the development of nuclear power and, to a degree, space materials and so on. It was a practical matter. The other side of this situation, the Manichaean devil, is simply another way to talk about the Cold War. You can't get Congress to appropriate money for an enormous war organization unless you can show a reason for it. We had to create the reason, we had to create this devil so we created Communism. Even the Soviets don't understand the communism we think about; it goes so far beyond their model. And we saw it in every closet, every country. We divided the entire world up into "us" and "them" and then began to create a military establishment that could counter, we thought, every move made by anybody. Every time India went a little bit pro Communist, India became our enemy. Every time India went a little bit toward us, they became our friend. Everybody was in that area; there were no neutrals, it was all "us" and "them." This has resulted in the expenditure of $6 trillion for armaments, most of which can never be used effectively. There is no way to use them effectively. Even in Vietnam. We dumped two-and-a-half times as much bombardment onto the ground in Vietnam as we did in all of World War II -- to what effect? We killed a lot of people. We uprooted a lot of trees and so on. But there was no actual military effect of that. That's the way the rest of our establishment is. They could have used hydrogen bombs and in fact, we did have nuclear weapons in Indochina. Fortunately we didn't use them. But they were there. On the other side of it, if you create this devil, and he's in every closet around the world, then you can justify having a 600-ship navy and a something-or-other wing air force, and an enormous army, because you keep telling the Congress and the American people that `My goodness, this great enormous devil is going to leap out of a closet any day at any time -- the war could start here or could start there -- we've got to be ready for the whole world.' And that's how you spend the money. Even though you can't prove what you're going to do with the money, you spend it. The devil scares you so bad that you don't think anymore. Take the Strategic Defense Initiative, this thing that was going to cost billions and billions: now we spend for a B-2 bomber which is supposed to be stealthy and they claim that radar cannot find that bomber as it approaches. Heck, it makes more noise than almost anything you ever heard. It's got huge engines and they're ducted out so that even the radar can't read the engine, but that doesn't mean it shuts the sound down. The first way we used to detect bombers coming during World War II was with noise devices. So they'll simply go back to noise devices -- the Stealth Bomber will be worthless. It's already worthless before it flies. The most expensive airplane ever built -- they spent $65 billion on an airplane they can't get in the air yet and when it does, all the enemy will have to do instead of using radar is use audio to listen for it and they'll know it's there. We don't even know what we're doing. That's what this Manichaean devil does. I'd like to mention an interesting side-line about Vietnam. The Vietnam escalation modestly began in the Kennedy Era, and Kennedy was said to have around him the Irish Mafia. If you are familiar with the lore of old Ireland, you'll know that the Irish mother would tell her bothersome child, `If you aren't a good boy, the cong will get you.' The cong was a ghost in the closet. In Vietnam, the word for a beggar is a kha, and they were briefing about these beggars, these trouble-makers in Vietnam, and they were calling them the Viet Kha. Kennedy's young Irish Mafia men who did not know much about Vietnam thought they were talking about the Viet Cong, the devil in the closet, and the word "Viet Cong" was created by mistake, by hearing the word "kha" as a Vietnamese word and "cong" as the Irish ghost. It just happened that in that era, we all of a sudden got Viet Cong phonetically out of the misapplication of the word right in an office in the Pentagon of Washington, and not out in the field. Ever after that, it was the Viet Cong. That's how we create our Manichaean devils, that's how we create our opposition, that's how we spend $6 trillion. Secret Team Foundations: Creation of the CIA Focal Point System Throughout The Government Ratcliffe: Further on you write about the realization of the Dulles-Jackson-Correa report's method of placing CIA agents throughout the government: Many of these people have reached positions of great responsibility. I believe that the most powerful and certainly the most useful agent the CIA has ever had operates in just such a capacity within another branch of the Government, and he has been there for so long that few have any idea that he is a long-term career agent of the CIA. Through his most excellent and skillful services, more CIA operations have been enabled to take place than can be laid at the feet of any other, more "legitimate," agent. This was the plan and the wisdom of the Dulles idea from the beginning. On the basis of security he would place people in all areas of the Government, and then he would move them up and deeper into their cover jobs, until they began to take a very active part in the role of their own organizations. This is how the ST was born. Today, the role of the CIA is performed by an ad hoc organization that is much greater in size, strength, and resources than the CIA has ever been visualized to be.[12] The first question I have here would be how "on the basis of security," would Allen Dulles "place people in all other areas of the government"? Prouty: When I was assigned to the Air Force Headquarters, in 1955, the Chief of Staff General Thomas D. White directed me to create an office "to provide the military support of the clandestine operations of the CIA" in accordance with the provisions of the National Security Council Directive #5412 of March 15, 1954, and to operate as the Pentagon "Focal Point Office for the CIA." As Mr. Dulles told me later, "I do not want various people from my agency going into the Pentagon and dealing with different people there and therefore exposing the activities of the CIA to a large number of people, because obviously such a ring would then proliferate to others and if they wanted submarines, they would have to bring in some navy people and if they wanted helicopters, they would have to talk to some army people." He said, "I want a focal point. I want an office that's cleared to do what we have to have done; an office that knows us very, very well and then an office that has access to a system in the Pentagon. But the system will not be aware of what initiated the request -- they'll think it came from the Secretary of Defense. They won't realize it came from the Director of Central Intelligence." The Dulles philosophy was to control the focal point area. This then led to the creation of focal point offices everywhere. As I established this "Tab-6" organization, as we called it, in every major staff area within the Air Force (because that was my jurisdiction at the time), I would "clear" people -- another focal point, you might say a sub-focal point -- a person I could go to who had been given, ahead of time, the authority to do whatever it was that he was authorized to do. We stressed this was only for "authorized" business -- he would have to be sure he had orders, either from my office or directly up to the Chief of Staff, and that we knew what we were doing for CIA. This leads to another step, of what you might call "breeding". We had to work with various agencies of the government, not just the Defense Department. We had to have contact points in the State Department, in the FAA, in the Customs Service, in the Treasury, in the FBI and all around through the government -- up in the White House. Gradually we wove a network of people who understood the symbols and the code names and the activities we were doing, and how we handled money which was the most important part. Then we began to assign people there who, those agencies thought, were from the Defense Department. But they actually were people that we put there from the CIA. This led to the creation of a system of powerful individuals -- people whose jobs were quite dominant in some of these other agencies. Especially after they'd been there two or three years, because we put them in there by talking to the top man, the cabinet officer or the head of the agency. We would say, "This man is being placed here so that he can facilitate covert activities and so that he can retain the secrecy that's required and he will keep you informed at all times." Well, in the over-all U.S. bureaucracy, the top people tend to move from one job to another faster than anybody else, not the career people who are there for a life-time. So the man we had explained the "Focal Point" structure to, perhaps a year-and-a-half earlier, would be transferred or leave the government. But our trained and fully cleared "Focal Point" man was still there. So after one or two cycles of this, that agency might not even know that employee was our man and not actually theirs because they would have no record of his special assignment, of what his origins were. They would think he was just another one of their own employees. As a result, he became extremely effective. Because if we wanted something done -- I remember a very sensitive operation that I needed some information on, and I needed it from the FBI. I didn't go to the FBI. I went to this guy that we had planted, and he got it twice as fast and in a much better form than I would have gotten it from the FBI, even though I was at that time working for the office of the Secretary of Defense. We had no trouble working with the FBI. This process was just to facilitate it and conceal the CIA role. These people became very, very adept. By the same token, people that were bona fide employees of CIA (agents), were assigned even into the office of the Secretary of Defense. We had certain people there who were CIA employees -- Ed Lansdale worked for CIA all his adult career. A person named Frank Hand worked there. But the people in the Pentagon thought they were ordinary military employees. They didn't realize they were CIA. To give you an example: Colonel Lansdale was a full colonel in the Air Force -- that was his cover story. And he had been a full colonel for a few years. And the Air Force was promoting some men to general. The question came up, would Lansdale be eligible? I told Mr. Dulles personally, I said, "You can make Lansdale a general if you just write a letter to General Lemay, because you're going to pay the bills anyway and not the Air Force." A few days later I got a call from General Lemay's office. He called me in and he had the list of men that the Air Force was promoting to general, and as I recall, it was 13 or 14 officers. General Lemay knew every one of them intimately except one. He said, "Prouty, I understood you know who this guy Lansdale is." He said, "I don't know who the hell he is. I'm not going to promote him to a general." And I said, "Well, don't you have a file on him?" He said, "Yes." He opened it up and the top letter was from Allen Dulles. I said, "He's a very important man for Allen Dulles." He said, "OK, I'll promote him." Just like that. That's a good way to get a promotion, you see. But that created a very important job within the structure of the office of the Secretary of Defense. Frank Hand had been there for years in the same way. Frank was a civilian of outstanding ability. I always wrote that he was the most important agent that the agency had because he was operating daily and effectively as a member of the office of the Secretary of Defense. You can just imagine the things that a person in that capacity can do when his home base is really CIA. Although people rarely believe this when they first hear it, there are assignments like that in the White House; there are assignments like that in the State Department. For instance, it's hard to tell the difference, between Bill Bundy who was a long-time CIA employee and his brother McGeorge Bundy who was in the White House with Kennedy. The two brothers certainly are going to act side-by-side -- they have the same goals and the same intentions. There were many instances that duplicated like that. It wasn't long -- I'd say by the end of the fifties or early sixties -- before we had spread through the government what I called a Secret Team, a group of people who really knew how to operate the CIA business through the boundless maze of the United States government. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. The Secret Team, Appendix II, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STappendix2.html 2. "For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government. . . . I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment that I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda." Washington Post, December 21, 1963. 3. Ibid, p.138, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp5.html#p138 4. Ibid, pp.291-2, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp13.html#p291-2 (While this excerpt was not explicitly read out loud during the interview, it is included here since its content is so essential to the discussion at this point.) 5. "that position" meaning OPC. Although OPC is not being explicitly mentioned here, it is what was being referred at this point, as discussed back on page 96. 6. During the period we were trading hand edits back-and-forth to make the raw transcript of the tape recordings readable as the text format of this book, there was a point when Fletcher replaced the word he had used in the interview, "structurally," with "notionally". Because of the small handwriting, i was not sure i had this term spelled correctly and asked him about it when i passed my next round of edits back. He responded with the following: I just noticed one small item on a page here. It has intrigued me since you first brought it up. You want to know what this word "notionally" is. That is a better question than you may have thought. In the CIA there are many words, phrases and codes that have special meaning in the trade. So "notion" is an idea. In the CIA a "notional" assignment is one that is acted upon as a logical "idea" but the "idea" itself is used to cover the real job, or concept. For example: the CIA runs a big airline in the Western Pacific region. It is based in Taiwan and flies to most major cities in the Rim areas. So it is a real airline. That's the "idea" but that "notion" covers the fact that its primary business is to have aircraft available all over the area for the CIA's covert work. So it is a "notional" airline. The CIA crowd use that special meaning of the word quite frequently. I've been pleased to have you pick up on that, because it serves to show how effective such "codes", "Concepts", etc., can be in the real world. They are a gang of characters. That's why I called my work "Team B". We certainly made no attempt to be thought of as "Team A" in the eyes of the public: but with the CIA we did the job of an "A" class team. 7. Ibid, p.141, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp6.html#p141 8. Ibid., http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp5.html#p126-7 9. Ibid., p.74, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp3ii.html#p74 10. Ibid., pp.226-27, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp10.html#p226-7 11. Ibid., p.202, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp9.html#p202 12. Ibid., p.260, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp11.html#p260 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soap-boxing! 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