War Without End

gchq

The Central Intelligence Agency and World Peace

Transcript of a speech at Yale University, April 5th 1975

Col. Fletcher Prouty

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As far back as 1943... I went into Saudi Arabia on what was then termed a clandestine operation. It was a rather modest affair. But if you can remember, in the latter part of 1943, Roosevelt was planning to meet with Churchill, and with Chang Kai-Shek in Cairo.

To add a little flavor to their meeting and perhaps to underscore it's pertinence to today's headlines, they sent a team into Saudi Arabia where they were just beginning to discover that there was a lot of petroleum, and a fourth world leader took part in the Cairo conference that few people either knew about or recalled and he was King Ibin Saud. Shortly there after we went up to Teheran to the Teheran conference and we met with Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt and the world press read that China was not represented there because Russia was not at war officially with Japan and it would be improper to have China there.

In other words we were getting used to telling people what we wanted them to believe, instead of what was actually going on, because I happen to be the pilot of that airplane that flew the Chinese to Teheran.

In 1944 I did a lot of work in Turkey because we found out that there was a gold smuggling ring of tremendous proportions moving gold from Germany right through the lines and somehow it was getting to Latin America and I think we've all read since then what a tremendous amount of gold was moved through that area and the effect it has had upon relations with Latin America and certain other world powers since that time, we went into Turkey to try and break that ring and eventually it was. Some of you may remember a movie actor named Bruce Cabot. He was one of the men that was wrapped up in it.

I went up into Russia later that year on an operation that had to do really with what we call a shuttle bombing, or the lack thereof since all the bombers were destroyed on the ground by the German Air Force and in sending so many planes in there we thought it would be a good chance to get a little intelligence so we slipped an extra plane in to do some map filling, there were too many blanks in the Russian maps and we didn't know enough about the country and in a rather amateur way they equipped the plane which I flew into the Soviet Union up around Kiev from Teheran so again it was part of the growing move to that kind of activity.

In August of 1945 I was among those who went into Tokyo at the time of the surrender, flew back by going over Hiroshima and landed in Okinawa and in Okinawa saw them loading ships, as many as they could in that famous harbor that had been bombed by the Kamikaze's so frequently. I went down the dock to see what was going on and we found that tons and tons and boatloads of supplies had been brought to Okinawa for the Japanese invasion and would not be needed, were being shipped southward, being shipped to a harbor whose name in those days we hardly knew called Haipong, and from Haipong they would be delivered to Hanoi to a Colonel whose name I happen to remember. It was Giap, and Giap's boss was a man named Ho Chi Min. And the reason we were dividing the mountains of supplies on Okinawa between Korea on one hand and Indo-China on the other was that we had through the OSS, the precursor of the CIA, contact with Ho Chi Minh, in the name a Major General Gallagher. And General Gallagher had received authority to bring more than ten complete divisions of equipment into Hipong for delivery to General Giap whom the French were fighting not too many years later.

These are some of the things that help you put into perspective how our Country began to internationalize clandestine efforts. I had the real pleasure to come home from Okinawa and find orders that sent me here to Yale and I taught here at Yale for three years with what was then the first days of the Air Force's ROTC program.

I think some of the people that were in our classes in those days have participated in things now that, they look back on those days a quite a different program than we've in the years since I left here because I went on into the Korean War and here again we supported activities such air drops in the Chinese area.

We supported activities in the Philippines that were as I mentioned this afternoon to some of you that led to the election of Magsaysay. This was a major operation run by the CIA. We flew the Magsaysay team as we call them into Saigon to support President Diem as he got started and as some of you have read in the Pentagon papers. It was called the Saigon Military Mission. Of course there were no military in the military mission that was just it's name as most of the activities in Vietnam were named military activities up through about 1963. When finally the escalation reached the point where when Marines came in it became a Military action. Up to that time most of the operational action was sort of around the corner. It was under the operational control of Central Intelligence Agency.

We did some work in India in those days and again going across what we called the Embassy Run in South East Asia back into Saudi Arabia where by that time 1954, 1955, the oil discoveries there had bloomed into the greatest oil field in the world and today we certainly recognize the importance of that.

So much for laying a little ground rules here a little background to show that this country began clandestine activities a little tentatively as part of military programs. At the end of the war the first official action that Truman took in what we used to call the demobilization, was the disbanding of the OSS. In it's place he established what he called the Central Intelligence Group. The Central Intelligence Group was formed by Presidential direction simply to bridge the time between the OSS which was going out of business and the formation of a Central Intelligence Agency which is then being discussed by Congress and any of you who hope to understand the CIA and understand what our country was doing in establishing this organization must go back into the history and look at the discussions the debates the arguments of that period 1946, 1947.

The war had ended, we were without question the leading military power in the world. We had the atomic weapons, and yet all of a sudden recognizing the power of the atomic weapons, and knowing full well that any scientific achievement is simply proof that it can be done, therefore any other scientist and any other engineers can build the weapon. We knew that there was only a certain amount of time before Russia or any other country could obtain and use those weapons if they could work out a means of delivery and even that wasn't too serious. So much of our thrust for intelligence in those days involved whether or not the Soviet community was gaining the upper hand or was moving up on us as you might say in the field of Atomic Energy. With this behind the thrust and knowing also that in WW II our intelligence community was too separated. The Navy would get intelligence and wouldn't tell the Army, the Army would have intelligence and wouldn't tell the Navy. The FBI was responsible for intelligence in Latin America. The OSS was operating, but the OSS didn't bother much with intelligence and so on. So there were two great drives.

One was to establish a coordinated intelligence system and the other was to gain all the intelligence we could on nuclear weapons. Working under this drive then Congress put together the law which today prescribes precisely how they warranted the CIA the Central Intelligence Agency organized. Here again we must be very precise in our interpretations about this law for example, when Cy Hearse released this information a little while ago about the thousands and thousands of people that the agency had been tapping or investigating in domestic surveillance.

One of the things that Bill Colby came out and said real quickly was, "well we weren't really investigating domestic activities we were checking on people who were friends of foreigners here in the United States who want to see how far they had gone", in other words opening a door to say that the Central Intelligence Agency as charged by law with protecting it's sources and methods. Now how many times have all of you heard that the Central Intelligence Agency is charged by law with protecting it's sources and methods in fact they bring people in court for that for the revealing sources and methods. But have any of you looked that up, do you know that is not part of the law? The law does not say anywhere the Central Intelligence Agency is responsible for protecting sources and methods.

Ever since Allen Dulles began to build the clandestine side of the agency they have tried to make people including most of our senators and most of our members of the house believe that this is one of the reasons why they become involved at least preferably in the investigation of people here in the domestic scene. To protect sources and methods. Now what the law does say and the law was very correct about it, that the Director of Central Intelligence, not the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Director of Central Intelligence who was also the Director of Navy Intelligence, or Army Intelligence, or State Department Intelligence is responsible for protection of sources and methods, for a very obvious reason. If Navy Intelligence uncovers somebody over in this room and Army Intelligence uncovers somebody in that room and it turns out the both of them are working with somebody in another room they better tell each other before somebody knocks the other guys head off. That's a pretty practical reason, but to say that the Central Intelligence Agency is responsible with that is a different part of the machinery entirely and the law doesn't say that.

There are many of these things in this law that we are sort of brainwashed into believing are in the law, one of the senators who is on this committee that is working on the investigation of the Agency asked me a while back, He said what is there about the Agency's secret charter that we should know? And how many times have you all heard about that there was a charter for the Agency that gives them the right to do all these things and they quote something about being able to do whatever the National Security Council directs them from time to time and that therefore this gets them into the clandestine business. That isn't the way Congress wrote the law. The law that established the Central Intelligence Agency did it to coordinate intelligence. The Agency was created to coordinate the intelligence of other departments and agencies. Congress knew we had intelligence what it needed was coordination, central coordination.

Harry Truman said, "I've now got an intelligence arm that can brief me, the President and I get it all in one place instead of having to go to all the separate ones". That's what the law said and subordinate to that, there are five subparagraphs, but subparagraphs are always subordinate to the main paragraph, they simply deal in the routine things, like printing intelligence, doing things of common concern like running computers. And then that final one that Mr. Dulles made us believe was the catch all, saying that the Agency will do those things which the National Security Council from time to time may direct.

I used to have in my files and I worked in the office of the Secretary of Defense, the original copy of that paper. In the margin of that copy in the personal pencil handwriting of President Eisenhower was an explanation of what was meant by NSC 5412 /2 which some of you may know as the old 10/2 or the clandestine direction or the "secret charter".

It wasn't that at all. It was a clarification of this sub paragraph which is in the law. In the margin Eisenhower had written, "That anyone who utilized this version of the law was to remember that, time to time meant that the agency would have no power consecutively to carry out operations in a continuity. And secondly that they would carry them out only when directed". And the reason he wrote that out on the copy that came to the Secretary of Defense was that when the agency needed the equipment, aircraft, weapons, people. At one time I had the names of more than 7000 military people and 605 military units that existed in the Defense Department in the support of clandestine activities of the agency. But when these were to be used it was to be from time to time only and then specifically by direction of the agency.

How different that is from what a lot if people are saying today. Even some of them that are well intentioned about the things that the agency is permitted to do.

I call to your attention the current edition of Newsweek. In that issue on the column that is headed,"My Turn". Some gentlemen says we should abandon the agency, do away with it, we don't need it. I forgot his name, its a pretty good article. But in it he also is stating some of these things that are not so, that make you think that there is a secret charter that we don't know about.

I can tell you categorically, that other than the law of 1947 and some revisions of 1949 that have mostly to do with pay, retirement, and the handling of money, which is much abused, there is no secret charter. How can I stand those words. It was my job for years, for nine years to be specific. To brief such men as the Secretary of Defense and many of them. Mr. McElroy, Mr.Gates, Mr. McNamara and many other senior officers in the Pentagon. On files which had been collected over the years ever since the original act had been written. And all of the National Security Council papers, and all of what we call today the 40 committee papers, and any other letters of substance that pertained to the agency.

In those days, 1955, 56, 57, 58, when this business was handled a little more precisely than it is today. There was absolutely no reason at all to shield from the Secretary of Defense anything as important as a secret charter. There is no secret charter.

And having said that then, there is nothing but the law, and having said that then when we investigate CIA, the thing to look for is to ask the agency, "what have you done that we're paying you to do". Almost everything else is unlawful, that's what's important about it and that's the ground we should stand on.

These committees that are working today should work from that side, that's were the strength is. All the rest of the things the agency is doing, they could cut the funds off. And if they cut the funds most of them would come to a halt. Its important to go back to those basic things.

Another thing the committee should look at is the fact that in 1948, President Truman called in three gentlemen, Allen Dulles, Mathias Correa, and William H. Jackson. He established a commission after one year operation of CIA to study the CIA and see how it was performing with reference to the law which had been passed one year earlier.

Its a very interesting thing that he did this, because in 1948 especially right in the summer towards the end of the year, he was running against Thomas E. Dewey for re-election. As most of you remember the chances of Truman being re-elected were pretty slim. Mr. Dulles was working on this CIA report for Truman also happened to be the speech writer of Thomas E. Dewey. Dulles was working under mixed emotions you can be sure because he visualized himself, as soon as Dewey was elected, as being director of Central Intelligence. He had to wait about four more years.

The Jackson, Correa, Dulles report should be surfaced, just like many of us this afternoon said the Warren Commission work should be sufficed, reopened, and studied. There is no more important document somewhere buried in the files, its a book called the Dulles, Jackson, Correa report dated 1st of January 1949. Because that was Allen Dulles "Mien Kampf", that was his instructions to the agency and to the rest of the community, what he was going to do in the agency area. That was the beginning of organized, worldwide, highly funded, clandestine activities.

When he became the director of Central Intelligence in 1953, after Eisenhower's election. The report that had laid there for four years while Truman ignored it, became the working document, and this if anything is the secret charter. But it is not a legal secret charter. It was written by this commission, turned in to the President, and later just used without any sanction by Congress or any proper authority.

Some of you may recall just before Eisenhower was elected at the end of Trumans tenure and after the Korean war had started. There was a lot of feeling that the agency had missed the boat, as they did many times, in predicting whether or not there would be a Korean war. Truman replaced the then director of Central Intelligence with Gen. Walter Bedall Smith. Smith had been ambassador to Moscow. He had been back shortly and he intended to retire but agreed for the rest of Mr. Truman's term to serve as the Director of Central Intelligence. This was in the pre Joe McCarthy era when the term "Red Herring", or worse bandied about everywhere.

Somebody asked Gen. Smith, in the hearings for his nominations and acceptance as the Director if by some chance there were any KGB operators in the Central Intelligence Agency. Gen Smith, the realist, pragmatist that he was, just back from Moscow, with due respect for the Soviets said " of course there are". He blew the lid off the senate. They said prove it. He said, "No you asked me and I assume there are".

I think that current events may cause us to look a little more carefully at what Walter Bedall Smith meant. Because some people have scurried out of the agency lately that he might have had in mind.

Let me bring things just a little bit up to date, and then I'll close because we have a most interesting program. I'm trying to set a certain perspective. I'm truing to get you to feel that there's a lot of reason for going to the guts and bones of this affair. Its very interesting and very titillating to talk about things that have happened in various countries and we could do that forever. If you want to ask questions, I'll be glad to join in. But I'm trying to stick to basic issues, so I'll close on one.

Much is said about the 40 committee. I've written about it recently and some of you may have seen the article I wrote. The 40 committee is a fallout from the days when Allen Dulles went to his brother John Foster Dulles and said, "Now look, there's no reason why when I have a clandestine operation planned, I should have to get you, you're busy, or Mr. Wilson - Secretary of Defense, or Mr. McElroy and bring them over and have a meeting or the President or Vice-President", in other words the National Security Council.

There is no reason why we should have the most important men in the country tied down every time I want to bring something in see if I can get approval for clandestine operations. Let's establish a committee have someone from the White House appointed, somebody from the State, somebody from Defense, and I'll attend the committee, I Allen Dulles.

Sounds like a pretty logical idea especially when your brothers the Secretary of State , that gives you two votes out of four. It went through pretty easy , but look what it did. It destroyed the controls that Congress had put over the Agency .

The Congress knew the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State and the President and Vice-President were busy Men and that's why the Congress said that if ever the agency was to be ordered to do something that wasn't specifically covered by the law, it would be done only time to time and then at the direction of the National Security Council not somebody else. That was to keep it from happening often and regularly and irregularly. So in the beginning they had a little committee they called the ten slant two committee and it became the 5412 committee and it became the counter insurgency committee, it became the 303 committee and today it's the Forty Committee. All the numbers mean nothing, well not nothing but originally ten/two was NSC document 10/2 and so on but later it just got a code name for a group of men who sit down and tell the Agency whether or not they had the authority to do this. Now does it work that way.

In my day if I got a call from CIA and said look we are sending a couple of men we're going to need some aircraft and we're going to need a base to operate from and we'll probably need some money and some ammunition and some airdrop equipment and so on, we'll come over and explain the mission. I'd say fine, they'd come over to the Pentagon and we'd have a little meeting.

As soon as the door was shut and they were on there way back to what was then Foggy Bottom where their headquarters were, I would go right up to the office of the Secretary of Defense, I would get out the log of the Forty Committee and if that activity was listed there and if it was listed with full approval, then I would go to the Secretary of Defense and I would say. Is this the way you saw this activity when it was presented?

If his representative the man who had gone had briefed him on it or if he had been there personally he'd give me an answer yes or no. If it was no we would not provide the support in other words the committee did serve a function as long as it was used that way. By about 1961, 62, 63, the committee became a rubber stamp and even less.

Today the committee works even worse because the senior man on the Forty Committee for the White House is the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Kissinger. He still retains the job of the National Security Advisor to the President. Now this puts up a very trying situation and it explains some of things that have happened quite recently, because if you go into your bank someday and you recognize the man sitting behind the desk as a man whose picture you just saw as being put in jail as a robber doing undercover work which man do you think you're dealing with, the robber or the banker? If you're Indira Gandi and this gentleman comes breezing in on "Air Force One", is he there on a clandestine activity or is he there a Secretary of Defense? I think this explains the recent characteristics of what has become shuttle diplomacy. If you're dealing with people undercover, clandestinely in things that you can't print and put above board then you deal with them two at a time, bilaterally. You can't call them all in and say, "look fellas we've got a problem in the Middle East let's sit down and talk about it." You run from one to the other to the other.

The big error in this kind of thing the failing in this kind of thing and of course saying this today after it has failed miserably is hindsight but it underscores it, that they all talk to each other. As soon as he leaves Cairo, Cairo calls up Rehad , as soon as he leaves Rehad they all call Teheran, as soon as they call Teheran they even call Jerusalem, because at least they're all in this thing and if they get together behind his back there's no possible chance at negotiations. You see what it does this clandestine activity wrecks any hope of success, the Forty Committee should be abolished. It serves no purpose. We should go back to the law which strictly says that if clandestine activities must be carried out then the President, Vice-President, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State must in concert agree with them, that means there would be very few operations and they would be limited and they would be small and they would be very, very important. Now that's what the law says and they've gone so far from that. That's why we have the problems that we have today.

I personally do not call for the abolition of CIA. I think we need intelligence, good intelligence, in fact we have good intelligence. We have overshot the mark by ten fold building up the clandestine side, what we call the clandestine side of the house. The budget of CIA is about 750 million dollars and that's alot of money. But even that is open to question, because it's only a few days ago it was revealed that 350 million of that 750 million went down to the Pacific looking for a submarine.

Don't let the figures fool you, there's nearer to 6 billion dollars being spent every year in the name of intelligence, and we all need to look into it

gchq

GETTING THE "BUSINESS" IN VIETNAM
The POW/MIA Roadblock.

Comment by L. Fletcher Prouty

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Little things like "Japan's bulging $50 billion trade surplus with the United States" were not allowed to cast a shadow on President Clinton's pleasant trip to Tokyo with Hillary last July. It concerned him not at all. What's a few billion?

While the President attended the G-7 Summit Conference, the Washington POST carried the following headline:

"Mitsubishi's Secret Plan for Vietnam".

The rest of the world has locked-up deals totaling not less than $4.6 billion in Vietnam with much more to follow. The United States had barely reached the level of one-half billion dollars by the end of 1992. That's a ridiculously poor trade-off for nearly three decades of conflict that cost us not less than $570 billion; or, could the incentive of that $570 billion itself be providing the motivation for future "Vietnams" elsewhere in the world?

The same issue of the POST gave us part of the answer:

"While We Play POW Politics, Japan Inc. Is Tooling Up."

This game of "Prisoner Of War/Missing In Action Politics," (POW/MIA) has been exploited as a pawn in an imposed U.S. Trade Embargo against Vietnam, an embargo extended by Clinton. This short-sighted action is costing American companies billions of dollars in that fast growing Southeast Asian consumer market.

What really lies at the root of this anti-business Trade Embargo? What is the real meaning of "POW/MIA Politics"? What are the stakes in the game? Who are the people playing the game?

For three decades, the POW/MIA issue has been a sinister scheme wrapped in a heavy cloak of secrecy. We sympathize with its true victims; but it is high time that this contrived issue be defined, acted upon and terminated. We need to understand that the real, never-stated, root causes of this POW/MIA impasse are based upon the following complex subjects:

a) Because the nature of "Warfare" in the future will be shaped on the Indochina conflict model, and upon the utilization of the CIA in its "make-war" role, it will be necessary to clarify the status of CIA clandestine operators in "Peacetime Operations" for future purposes. From the U.S. point of view, this role should be neither the traditional "spy" or the equally imperiled "illicit agent". Perhaps it can be made to be that of the "Peace keeper" from "Special Forces".

In any case, today it is not covered by the International Law of War. Nevertheless, captured or missing Intelligence agents are not protected by the provisions of the Geneva Convention. Because of that, how shall they be utilized in war-like operations around the world where sooner or later they may fall into enemy hands?

b) The dollar potential of the burden of insurance coverage for the POW who may be declared dead in captivity; and for the MIA who may be lawfully declared dead at some future date can be enormous. Quite naturally the insurance industry joins the family in desiring the return of the POW alive, or in the postponement of the decision on the MIA's death. Both cases defer payments to the beneficiary, and the family continues to receive the pay and allowances of the POW/MIA... until the release of the prisoner or a ruling of death of the MIA.

c) The Missing Persons Act directs the services to continue the serviceman's pay and allowances while he is a POW or MIA. Usually it is in the financial interest of the beneficiary to defer a finding of death until there has been a conclusive review as required by law. In 1976 it was estimated that the Government was paying $9 million more annually in benefits to MIA families than would be the case if the men had been declared dead and payments ended. Of course, then... with the finding of death... the insurance company pays off the total of the policy; so they are not declared dead. That's a part of the "politics".

d) In Southeast Asia, certain Americans, and their global mobster networks, amassed enormous fortunes in illicit drug transactions and through black-market money changing, gold and gem smuggling, and complex dealings in United States military material shipments to Vietnam. It has been reported to Congress that huge arms and supply diversions in Southeast Asia fueled currency frauds costing, at government minimum figures, $51.8 billion in U.S. Treasury losses. Americans are generally unaware of the fact that many, so called POW/MIA cases may be due to nothing more than the voluntary disappearance of a man who has made millions in drugs or other illicit gains while in Vietnam. He can't come back. He won't come back. He's trapped with his millions... on the Riviera, perchance?

NOTE: This latter subject is so little-known and so enormously important to the business world today that it needs to be discussed in some detail in a following article. It underscores how significant this game of "POW/MIA"politics can be on an international scale; and clarifies why the U.S. government policy has been orchestrated to create and maintain this costly U.S. Trade Embargo against Americans doing business in Vietnam on this relatively superficial charge of POW/MIA non-accountability. This is not only a problem of the past. It looms as a growing problem for the future as the United States and its United Nations counterparts concentrate on Indochina-type conflicts for the future.

These significant financial matters can not be over-looked as inevitable causes of the game of "POW/MIA Politics". But, that is not all. More is at stake and for bigger money. It may be that there will be no more major "declared" world wars involving millions of Americans and modern weaponry of all kinds. The United States is increasingly becoming involved in limited action... hardly wars. Such warfare against disorganized and irresponsible foes, such as the Viet Cong, in the Balkans, the Middle East, or in Africa where the enemy may lack the ability and the organization to account for and take care of POW/MIA combatants, may totally eliminate the possibility of a "Geneva Convention"-type of civilized POW/ MIA treatment. "POW/MIA Politics" may represent an emerging substitute for traditional POW practices. We'll see. Let's look at the big picture.

During November 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, Chiang Kai Shek and Stalin met in Teheran for a conference that would forever shape the future of Europe, Asia and the United States. Roosevelt, Stalin, and Chiang agreed fully that France must not regain Indochina. Roosevelt added, "After 100 years of French rule in Indochina, the inhabitants were worse off than they had been before."

It may be noted that John Foster Dulles, as his biographer Leonard Moseley wrote, declared in a speech before the Korean Parliament on June 19, 1950:

"The American people welcome you as an equal partner in the great company of those who make up the free world, a world which commands vast moral and material power, and whose resolution is unswerving... I say to you: You are not alone. You will never be alone so long as you continue to play worthily your part in the great design of human freedom."

This speech took on even greater significance, when on the following Sunday the North Korean army invaded South Korea and the Korean war began... right on schedule. Moseley recalls that, George V. Allen, U.S. Ambassador to Korea had turned to another guest and said that Dulles spoke as if he had "his own line to God", and that "he was getting his instructions from a very high source". On that date, Dulles was not connected with the U.S. government in any capacity.

(It may be well to note that the United States and the government of North Korea may be readying another scenario, at the present time for a similar purpose to that played out in 1950-1953.)

On a similar occasion, on September 2, 1953, precisely eight years after World War II ended, President Dwight Eisenhower's Secretary of State, the same John Foster Dulles, delivered a major address at the American Legion convention in St. Louis. With reference to communism and to Indochina, Dulles said:

"In Indochina, a desperate struggle is in its eighth year... we are already contributing largely in material and money to the combined efforts of the French and of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia." [In 1953 he had to mean, "and to Ho Chi Minh". The nation of South Vietnam did not exist then.]

Such statements generate future wars. When the planned invasion of Japan, with 500,000 American troops, had proved to be unnecessary in August 1945, more than one-half of the stockpiled military material on Okinawa was immediately re-loaded and shipped to Haiphong in Vietnam and given to Ho Chi Minh. The other half was sent to Syngman Rhee in Korea. That's strategic planning at its best; credit the "Big Four" decisions at Teheran in 1943. That gets an enormous supply of costly new armaments out of the U.S. inventory and opens the door to early post-war procurement of replacement equipment. One of the primary purposes of modern warfare is to bring about the attrition of billions of dollars worth of military material.

These enormous gifts of weapons to Syngman Rhee in Korea and to Ho Chi Minh made it possible for them to declare the independence of their countries, and to provide the war-making locale for the forces of the United States during the following thirty years.

These weapons had made it possible, on September 2, 1945, for Ho Chi Minh to declare the independence of Vietnam from French colonial rule, while at his side stood a U.S. Army General and an American OSS man. At sea, U.S. Navy transport vessels were carrying the cache of arms that became the basis of power of the emergent North Vietnamese nation, and the arsenal for nearly three decades of brutal warfare.

It should be noted that no President of the United States ever defined and stated the "Military Objective" of the U.S. presence in Vietnam during those three decades. No war can be won without a military objective. This uncertain warfare won nothing.

For the next three or four years the United States supported Ho Chi Minh. On September 21, 1945, the first American casualty in Vietnam, Lt. Col. Peter Dewey, was killed in Saigon. By the nineteen fifties, U.S. support had been shifted to the French as they fought to regain control of Vietnam. Despite that, they were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 by Ho Chi Minh's forces using their American weapons. The French loss added some $2 to $3 billion more in advanced U.S. weaponry for Ho Chi Minh as he took over their arsenal of American supplied arms.

This accounts for those eight years in Indochina, 1945-1953, John Foster Dulles had mentioned in his rousing American Legion speech. As a good lawyer, Dulles spoke on behalf of his patrons as he moved this country along its "make-war" course in Indochina. For them "SOVIET" and "SO. VIET" had become the winning combination.

During the latter part of 1953, I had been appointed Commander of a Military Air Transport squadron based in Tokyo. Our scheduled flights included weekly schedules to Manila, Saigon and Bangkok. During this period, 1953-1954, I met Col. Edward G. Lansdale. He and his undercover CIA agents had just succeeded in the over-throw of President Querino with the controlled election of Ramon Magsaysay. This undercover political victory played a major part in Lansdale's transfer to Indochina, and to the acceleration of "make-war" activities: as we shall see.

During the January 8, 1954 National Security Council meeting, President Eisenhower made the following statement:

"I can not imagine the United States putting ground forces anywhere in Southeast Asia... Indeed, the key to winning this war was to get the Vietnamese to fight. There was just nosense in even talking about United States forces replacing the French in Indochina. I can not tell you [he said with vehemence] how bitterly opposed I am to such a course of action. This war in Indochina would absorb our troops by divisions!"

This was January 8th, 1954, and it was the President and the National Security Council, our ultimate national security authority; yet, by January 29, 1954, Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence, had won the approval of the President's Special Committee on Indochina to greatly increase the role of the CIA in Indochina by creating a Saigon Military Mission. His first official move was to attach Col. Lansdale, a CIA agent under Air Force cover, to the Military Assistance Advisory Group in Saigon, MAAG. In Indochina, the MAAG was not a "militarymission" but only an administrative group.

Dulles, in less than one month, had completely ignored the warnings of the President, and had circumvented them with the creation of the Saigon Military Mission. This organization marked the beginning of a clandestine, para-military force that would bring Ngo Dinh Diem into power as President of Vietnam by mid-1954. At almost the same time the Geneva Conference divided Vietnam into a "North" and a "South" sector. It became the responsibility of the CIA's Saigon Military Mission, with a "blank check-book" and plentiful military material support from the Pentagon, to raise the level of the conflict in Vietnam, year by year in preparation for a major conflagration in Indochina.

Once he had become established in Saigon, his first, and most effective campaign brought about the movement of one million, one hundred thousand native north Vietnamese to the south in U.S. Navy transport vessels and CIA's Civil Air Transport air fleet. This was done by "sophisticated" terrorism... called "Psychological Warfare". In later years these homeless refugees became the "insurgents" and the fodder of the long years of pointless warfare that followed.

During the early 1960's, President John F. Kennedy did his best to prevent the shipment of American military units to Indochina with his policy as stated in National Security Action Memorandum #263, Oct 11, 1963, to the effect that he would have all U.S. personnel out of Vietnam by the end of 1965. Note the President's use of the word "U.S. personnel". He did not limit that to "military personnel". By saying "all U.S. personnel" he meant the CIA. That decision, i.e. not to send more Americans into Vietnam, among others related to it, cost him his life.

The first American was captured by the Viet Cong in the early sixties. (Note the use of the word "American" alone and not "American soldier" to differentiate a CIA combatant from a U.S. Army soldier. This has become a most important distinction in the game of POW/MIA politics, but is never mentioned.) By that time an Interdepartmental Committee on Prisoner Matters existed and was chaired by the Dept. of State. (Again, this was not the traditionally correct Military committee.)

By 1960 the United States had been deeply involved in make-war efforts in Indochina for fifteen years: first with Ho Chi Minh, then the French and finally with Diem and the newly created nation of South Vietnam. This was a new kind of war. It was a "war" without a declaration and with its U.S. combatants covertly under the command control of the CIA... a war without the generals. [Those "Generals" who were there during those years were either CIA men under the cover of General officer rank, such as Maj.General Edward G. Lansdale, or military men who served in a limited capacity under the Ambassador with a CIA Station Chief at his side.]

In retrospect, the United States had armed the only adversary ever to beat us in a war. As a result the American military industrial complex and its allies grossed no less than $570 billion from the investment. That lucrative 1943 decision, made at Teheran, had paid off.

The CIA had been created in 1947 and by 1954 was prepared for action. Before 1965, if military men were involved in Indochina, they served under the operational control of the CIA, and usually in support roles only, such as helicopter pilots and mechanics.

They were "sheep-dipped". They had to be volunteers, and their records were fabricated to make it appear that they were civilian employees of the U.S. Government or of secret proprietary organizations such as CIA's airline, "Civil Air Transport."

Clearly the CIA and personnel associated with the CIA do not qualify as "Prisoners of War" as contemplated by the Geneva Convention. They are spies, and our adversaries treat them as such. This places serious complications upon traditional POW procedures accorded to fighting men by all combatants, and endangers bona fide military combatants by association.

It was not until 1965, when U.S. Marines under U.S. Marine commanders invaded Vietnam, that a more normal condition of warfare began. Of the 2,600,000 million American military and civilian personnel who were involved in the Indochinese conflict, 2,546 were not accounted for by the end of hostilities in 1973.

To face reality, how did our Government expect our disorganized foes during the conflict in Indochina to account for those missing men? 541 were lost in South Vietnam where the "enemy" for the most part were the local renegade, "black pajama" clad Viet Cong. They were never a viable government. 475 more were lost in North Vietnam, which during those hectic years was fighting to establish a government. On July 17, 1993 it was reported that "Vietnamese leaders have said that they won the war, and they would not allow Washington to dictate terms". They have had enough of this game of "POW/MIA Politics."

There were 344 unreported POW/MIA in Laos. Here we have a situation in which we never were at war with Laos, and most of the men lost there were airmen who had taken part in air-raids on other targets. They were technically not prisoners of "War" or even missing in "Action". In Laos there was a newly formed, non-combatant government with limited, if any, administrative capability. It was confronted, internally, by a Pathet Lao force that was simply a renegade factor, i.e. hardly able to be responsible for POW/MIA's. The same applies to Cambodia where 28 Americans were unreported.

These may sound like small numbers and a lost cause; but to the insurance companies and to the families they are a very real personal and financial matter. By now, 1993, these men have become the root of the matter... at least for the families. How did it happen that "U.S. prisoner and missing in action" activities become the responsibility of a self-appointed League of Families? This had never before occurred in our history.

During the period from 1966 to 1970, an unusual Prisoner of War/Missing in Action movement began. Throughout our history the responsibility for captured servicemen during war, and the welfare of their families has rested in the hands of each of the military services.

According to "The Missing Man" a National Defense University Press publication:

"The local commander has the right and responsibility to declare an individual of his command dead should he believe the circumstances so warrant. A decision by the field commander to place a man in a KIA (killed in action) status is final and not subject to review or appeal. The local commander makes the appropriate reports to higher authority, the next of kin is notified, the man's records are closed out, and disbursements are made in accordance with service regulations and the recorded desires of the deceased."

Yet, despite this long tradition, the services appear to have dodged this role during these decades of Indochina hostilities in favor of a group of family members who, we have been led to believe, organized themselves to protect their own interests.

Why did they have to do this, "To protect their own interests?" This strange turn of events bears analysis.

This scenario begins, in the fall of 1966, with the wife of a prisoner, Comdr. J. B. Stockdale. Mrs. Sybil Stockdale put together an informal group of 35 POW/MIA families in the San Diego area. In May 1970, she called for a meeting of others who were active in these efforts in Washington, D.C. By the end of May this organization had been formalized as "The National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia".

(Note again the deliberate avoidance of the word "military".)

Its "Articles of Incorporation" were signed on May 28, 1970 by Maryanne K. Brockley, Ronald A. Jacks and Charles W. Havens III... all residents of Washington, D.C. An initial Board of Directors consisting of fifteen League family members was named. The National League was to be an independent "tax-free, non-profit, nonpartisan, humanitarian organization". Again, there was no mention of military.

An elaborate organizational ceremony was held on June 30, 1970 in the League's new offices in the Reserve Officers' Association building on Capitol Hill. I attended that meeting in response to an official request from a General in the Pentagon that I serve as an Advisor to this League of Families that was to be formed.

Subsequently, I received a letter dated August 18, 1970, signed jointly by Mrs. James B. Stockdale, Chairman of the Board, and Mrs. Iris R. Powers, National Coordinator of the League of Families, saying quite simply, "We need your advice. You could help by acting as one of our advisors". I became a member of the League's first Advisory Board as its Financial Advisor. At the time, I was employed as Vice President of a bank in the city. Their letter gave me no evidence that they had gotten my name from the Pentagon, or that they had any connection with any government department or agency whatsoever.

Although the League emphasized that it was "non-profit, non-partisan" and that it was "being financed by the families themselves and by contributions from concerned individuals and organizations", it became obvious that this precocious League was well connected and that its role had been carefully orchestrated. In my capacity as Financial Advisor I processed a League of Families' budget projection in 1971 for $1,065,400. That surprising amount speaks for itself.

The first matter of official business referred to me was a "Report of Advisory Committee on League Expenses" forwarded by Charles W. Havens III. Havens, a lawyer, and an incorporator of the League, served as its Counsel. His report arrived with a note typed on stationary from the "Reinsurance Association of America" that listed Havens as its "Vice President and General Counsel".

Another active supporter of the League of Families was William J. Baroody, President of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Loy Henderson, Paul McCracken and Milton Freidman served on that A.E.I. Advisory Board. At almost the same time the League was being formed, the A.E.I. asked Charles Havens to write a detailed legal analysis on the subject of "The Prisoner Of War Problem" as a public policy issue before the 91st Congress: Second Session. It is dated December 28, 1970.

It may be noted further that the Baroody Public Relations firm supplied another member of the League's Advisory Board. As a result of his experience he was able to get the League started with a most ambitious direct mail campaign and other major publicity activities.

In other words, not long after the League of Families was created it was immediately off and running with a fully prepared array of advisors and other government and corporate support in the wings.

This note that Havens sent to me introduced the subject of "Insurance", and its quiet and considerable interest in the POW/MIA situation. This was a subject rarely, if ever, discussed in public in connection with the POW/MIA situation. Almost every serviceman is covered by insurance. The dollar "overhang" of the policies of the 2,600,000 men involved, at one time or other, in Vietnam was considerable.

The incentive on the part of both the families and of the insurance companies to defer the finding of death, of POW's and MIA's, is considerable. Such a finding ends the family's payment on the policy and triggers the payment of that man's insurance coverage. This factor hits the insurance company twice:

a) no more income on that policy, and

b) the payment of the total policy amount to the beneficiary.

This explains, one reason, why it was decided that a League of Families be established separately rather than depending upon the military services to clear up POW/MIA affairs as had been traditional. It may also clarify why that League of Families was incorporated by a lawyer from the insurance business. The book, The Missing Man: Politics and the MIA by Captain Douglas L. Clarke, USN of the National War College and published by the National Defense University Press, does not mention this insurance connection. He writes,

"From its inception, the League had been given sound advice by its original volunteer legal counsel, Charles Havens III -a former Department of Defense lawyer."

This opens an interesting door.

This military author from the National War College placed Charles W. Havens III with the Department of Defense. Pentagon records reveal that, as early as 1967, Havens was the Assistant to Paul Warnke, who in turn was Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, OSD/ISA. At that time the

Secretary was Robert S. McNamara. Havens' Pentagon office was listed as Room 4E806, the same office as his boss, Mr. Warnke.

In those years that was an important and unusually active office. During the same years Havens was listed as being there, 1967-1973, it housed such other notables as Daniel Ellsberg, Gen R. V. Secord, Lawrence S. Eagleburger, Paul C. Warnke, Morton Halperin, Leslie Gelb, Roger E Shields, Townsend Hoopes, John McNaughton, Gen. John W. Vogt, Gen. Russell Dougherty, Paul Nitze, William P. Bundy and Adm Elmo R. Zumwalt.

At that time, Leslie H. Gelb (presently Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations) was assigned to the OSD/ISA office as Director of the Study Task Force assigned to come up with the "History of United States Involvement in Vietnam from World War II to the Present", (1945-1368) better known as the "Pentagon Papers".

It is interesting to note that both Les Gelb and Dan Ellsberg, the man who "leaked" the "Pentagon Papers" to selected news media, were assigned to ISA during these same years.

Because of the significance of Charles Havens' role in the game of politics of the League of Families, it may be necessary to carry this review forward through its formative years. By early 1969, Havens was listed in the Pentagon with a telephone in room 4E810, but his office was listed as 4E825 with the same assignment, i.e. Assistant to Mr. Warnke in OSD / ISA.

Recall that Havens was using Reinsurance Association of America offices in Washington, D.C. during the seventies, at least he was using their stationary; but Pentagon records through 1973 show him as assigned to OSD/ISA with a telephone in room 4E810. Roger Shields, later head of the Defense Department's POW/MIA Task Force is listed as having the same telephone number. Strangely, Havens is omitted from the ISA staff listing at this time, even though he had a room number and telephone there.

Such anomalies generally signal a form of "sheep-dipping" and that the individual had a contrived assignment and that his telephone and office records were created for "cover" purposes. This might have "covered" a nominal assignment to the Reinsurance Association of America offices for part of that period for the express purpose of working with the League of Families on behalf of government interests.

The significance of my assignment to the Advisory Board, and Havens' assignment there also, is that the League of Families, if not actually created by the government, had a very close relationship with the Government; and that its affairs were carefully guided by a team of knowledgeable officials, such as Havens and his high-ranking Pentagon superiors. There can be no doubt but what this situation applies today and that "POW/MIA" politics is still big business.

Before closing the book on the origin of the League of Families of Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, it may be well to look ahead at events that have already cast some shadows. What will be the role of the U.S. military forces in the years ahead? Will the CIA "Peacetime Operations" role in covert conflict remain the same? Will it be CIA's role to "make wars" until they burst into flame as happened in Vietnam in 1965? And, throughout all of this, what will become of the POW/MIA issue? Will there be any protection for the men involved and for their families? If so, will it be universally recognized by all countries, for all combatants... friend and foe?

If this subject of POW/MIA concerns is considered so important that its resolution outweighs the multi-billion dollar losses being suffered by U.S. businesses and by the nation's economy, as a result of this ridiculous Trade Embargo on Vietnam that has been recently rescinded, there must be a lot more to be said by someone, somewhere. The above represents an attempt to lift a corner of that tent.

gchq

HOW THE CIA CONTROLED PRESIDENT FORD

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In this monstrous U.S. government today, its not so much what comes down from the top that matters as what you can get away with from the bottom or from the middle - the least scrutinized level (Contrary to the current CIA propaganda as preached by William Colby, Ray Cline Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee, who say, incorrectly, What the Agency does is ordered by the President.)

As with the Mafia, crime is a cinch when you know the cops and the courts have been paid off. With the Central Intelligence Agency, anything goes when you have a respected boss to sanctify and bless your activities and to shield them from outside eyes.

Such a boss in the CIA was old Allen Dulles, who ran the Agency like a mother superior running a whorehouse. He knew the girls were happy, busy, well fed, but he wasn't quite sure what they were doing. His favorites all through the years of his prime as Director of Central intelligence were such stellar performers as Frank Wisner, Dick Bissel, George Doole, Sheffield Edwards, Dick Helms, Red White, Tracy Barnes, Desmond Fitzgerald, Joe Alsop, Ted Shannon, Ed Lansdale and countless others. They were the great operators. He just made it possible for them to do anything they came up with.

When Wisner and Richard Nixon came up with the idea of mounting a major rebellion in Indonesia in 1958, Dulles saw that they got the means and the wherewithal. When General Cabell and his Air Force friends plugged the U-2 project for Kelly Johnson of Lockheed, Dulles tossed it into the lap of Dick Bissell. When Dick Helms and Des Fitzgerald figured they could play fun and games in Tibet, Dulles talked to Thomas Gates, then Secretary of Defense, and the next we knew CIA agents were spiriting the Dalai Lama out of Lhasa, CIA undercover aircraft were clandestinely dropping tons of arms, ammunitions, and supplies deep into Tibet and other planes were reaching as far as northwestern China to Koko Nor.

While he peddled the hard-won National Intelligence Estimates to all top offices and sprinkled holy water over the pates of our leaders, Dulles dropped off minor miracles along the way to titillate those in high places. If you win the heart of the queen and convert her to your faith, you can control the kings.

This works for the Jesuits. It worked well for the CIA. Allen Dulles was no casual student end practitioner of the ancient art of religion. He was an expert in the art of mind-control. He learned how to operate his disciples and his Agency in the ways of the Cloth.

But for every Saint and every Sinner in the fold there must be an order of monks, and the Agency has always been the haven for hundreds of faceless, nameless minions whose only satisfaction was the job well done and the furtherance of the cause. One of the most remarkable and surely the best-of these was an agent named Frank Hand.

In my book, The Secret Team, written during 1971 and 1972, I mentioned that the most important agent in the CIA was an almost unknown individual who spent most of his time in the Pentagon. At that time I did not reveal his name, but a small item in a recent obituary column stated that:

"Frank Hand, 61, a former senior official of the CIA, died in Marshall, Minn... (he was) a graduate of Harvard Law School... He had served with the CIA from 195O until retirement in 1971."

After a life devoted to quiet, effective, skillful performance of one of the most important jobs in the worldwide structure of that unparalleled agency, all that the CIA would publicly say of Frank Hand was that he was a senior official.

Ask Dick Helms, Ed Lansdale, Bob McNamara, Thomas Gates or Allen Dulles, or John Foster Dulles, if they were with us today, and they all would tell us stories about Frank Hand. They should do more to characterize the nature and the sources of power which make use of and control the CIA than has ever been told before. He was that superior operative who made big things work unobtrusively.

You might have been one of the grass-green McNamara "whiz kids", lost in the maze of the Pentagon Puzzle Palace, who came upon a short, hobbit-like, peasant man who knew the Pentagon so well that you got the feeling he was brought in with the original batch of concrete. Thousands of career men to this day will never realize that Frank Hand was a "Senior Official" of the CIA and not one of their civilian cohorts. To my knowledge he never worked anywhere else.

I was there in 1955 and he was there. I left in December 1963, and he was at my' farewell party. He must have spent some of his time at the agency; but it must have been before 1955. If he had a dollar for every trip he made in those BUSY years between the Pentagon and the CIA, he would have died a very wealthy man. He popularized the agency term "across the river" and the "Acme Plumbers", nickname for agents of the CIA. A term later to be confused by Colson and John Ehrlichman, among others, with the use of the term "White House Plumbers" of Watergate fame. Someone knew that Hunt, McCord, the Cubans, Haig, Butterfield and others all had CIA backgrounds and connections and therefore were "Plumbers". Only the insiders knew about the real "Acme Plumbers".

Frank was as much at home with Allen Dulles as he was with the famous old supersleuth, General Graves B. Erskine, and as he was with Helms, Colby, or Fitzgerald.

Ian Fleming may have popularized the spy and the undercover agent as a flashing James Bond type; but in the reality of today's world the great ones are more in the mold of Frank Hand and the Spy Who Came in from The Cold.

There has long existed, a "golden key" group of agency and agency-related supermen. They came from the CIA, the Pentagon, the Department of State, the White House and other places in government or from the outside. They have kept themselves inconspicuous and they meet in the evening away from their offices. They are the men who open the doors of big government to industry, banking law and to the multi-national corporate centers of greed and power. Their strength lies in their common awareness of the ways in which real power is generated in the government, the real power that controls activities of the government. In many instances this is the power of being able to keep something from happening, rather than to make it happen. For example: if the President is murdered, real power involves the control of government operations sufficient to make any investigation ineffective and to assure that the government will do nothing even if the investigation should turn up something.

Real power is the ability to keep the government bureaucracy from going into action when the price of petroleum and wheat is doubled or tripled by avaricious international monopolies.

Some of these "gold key" members have surfaced and have accepted publicity, as did Des Fitzgerald, Allen Dulles, Tracy Barnes and others. Frank never did. He was so anonymous, that even his friends could not find him.

The Agency covered for Frank Hand as it did for few others. The James Bonds of this world may be the idols of the Intelligence coterie; but if you are a Bill Colby, Dick Helms or Allan Dulles you know the real value of an indispensable agent. Frank was their man in the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was always the indispensable prime target of the CIA. When the chips are down, the CIA could care less about overturning ''Communism'' in Cuba or Chile. What really matters is its relative power in the U.S. Government. Control of a good share of what the Pentagon is doing is more important to the CIA than control over the government of Jordan or Syria.

Once, when the CIA wanted to move a squadron (twenty-five) of helicopters from Laos to South Vietnam, long before the troubles there had become a war, I turned down the request from the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence in the name of the Secretary of Defense for no other reason than the fact that I did not find that project on the approved list of the National Security Council's "Forty Committee" (then called the 5412 / 2 committee). That meant the agency had nether been directed by the National Security Council to move those helicopters into Vietnam, nor had it received authorization for such a tactical movement In other words, the planned intervention into South Vietnam with a squadron of helicopters would at that time have been unlawful as an intervention into the internal affairs of another country.

This denial then, in 1960, effectively blocked the CIA from being able to move heavy war-making equipment into Vietnam. The helicopters were actually U.S. Marine Corps property on "loan" from Okinawa to the CIA for clandestine operations in Laos

At that time my immediate supervisor was General Graves Erskine, the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Special (Clandestine) Operations, and the man then responsible for all military support of clandestine operations of the CIA.

Also at that time, Frank Hand "worked for" Erskine. Of course, this was a cover assignment - 'cover slot' as it was known to us and to the CIA.

Frank had a regular office in the Pentagon. No sooner had the CIA request been turned down than someone near the top of the agency called Frank and told him about it. In his smiling and friendly way he came into my office, carrying two cups of coffee, and began some talk about music, travel, or golf. Then, as was his practice, he would get the subject around to his point with such a comment as. "Fletch, who do you suppose took a call here about the choppers in Laos?" and we would be off.

The special ability he possessed was best evidenced by the process he wound set in motion once he discovered a problem that affected the ambitions of the agency. He would talk about the choppers with Erskine. Then he would drop in to see the Chief of Naval Operations and perhaps the Commandant of the Marine Corps. He would talk with some of the other civilian Assistant Secretaries. In other words, he would go from office to office like a bee spreading pollen, titillating only the most senior officers and civilian officials with the nest highly sensitive tidbits about the CIA's plans for Vietnam. In this manner he would find out what the real thinking sin the Pentagon might be, and where there might be real opposition to such an idea-such as in the Marine Corps, which knew it would never get compensation for those expensive helicopters and for the loss of time of all their support people. He would also find out where there would be support, as with the ever-eager U.S. Army Special Forces, most of whose senior officers had been with the CIA.

Then he would drop out of the picture for a while to travel back to the old CIA headquarters, on the hill that overlooks what is now the Watergate complex, for a long talk with Allen Dulles or the Deputy Director, General Cabell.

On matters involving the clandestine services he would also stop by the old headquarters buildings, that lined the reflecting pool near the Lincoln Memorial to talk with Dick Helms, Desmond Fitzgerald and other operators. Within a day or two he would have them fully briefed on the steps to be taken in order to win over the Defense Department; or failing that, how to overpower and out maneuver the Pentagon in the Department of State and the White House.

The foregoing is a "case study" on the important subject of how the CIA really operates and what it believes is its top priority. The propaganda being spread around today by the CIA and its propagandists that, "What the CIA does is ordered by the President," is totally untrue in all but .00001 percent of actual historical cases. It is much more factual to say that, "What the CIA does is to find ways to initiate major foreign policy moves without having the President find out - or at least without discovery until it is too late.''

It is in precisely that manner that the CIA today works around, beneath and behind the White House to effect policies that could influence the survival of the nation and the world. "Gold Key" operatives are, at this very moment, carrying out CIA game plans entirely outside the power of President Ford's ability to affect their activities. He is totally without knowledge of most of them, and therefore powerless to stop or alter them.

In the case of the helicopters, Frank Hand was able to convince Allen Dulles that the disapproval from the Secretary of Defense, via my office, was real and that the Secretary would, at that time, be unlikely to change his mind. Frank also could report that the position of other top-level assistants was so cool to stepping up the hardware involvement of the military in Vietnam, in 1960, that none of them would likely attempt to persuade the Secretary to change his policy of limited involvement.

Fortified with the information gleaned by Frank Hand, Allen Dulles would have two primary options: drop the idea of moving helicopters into Vietnam, or bypass the Secretary Of Defense for the time being by going to the White House for support.

In 1960 this was a crucial decision. The huge attempt to support a rebellion in Indonesia had failed utterly, the U-2 operations had been curtailed because of the Gary Powers incident, the far-reaching operations into Tibet had come to a halt by Presidential directive and anti-Castro activities were limited to minor forays. And at that time the large-scale (large for CIA) war in Laos had become such a disaster that the CIA wanted no more of it.

Dick Bissell, the chief of the Clandestine Services, had written strong, personal letters to Tom Gates, the Secretary of Defense, wondering openly what to do about the 50,000 or more miserable Laotian Meo tribesmen the CIA had moved into the battle zones of Laos and then had deserted with no plans for their protection, resupply, care or feeding.

The CIA badly wanted to be relieved of the war that they had started and then found they could not handle. They wanted to transfer and thus preserve the agency's assets, including the helicopters, to the bigger prospects in Vietnam.

So, in 1960, if Allen Dulles dropped the idea of moving his assets from Laos, he would not only have lost those helicopters back to the Marine Corps but he would have seriously jeopardized the CIA's undercover leadership role in the development of the war in Vietnam, which it had been fanning since 1954.

This was a crucial decision for both the CIA and for those who wished to contain the agency. If those who wished to put the CIA genie back in the bottle had been able at that time to prevent the move of those CIA assets into Vietnam, Dulles would have had to disband them: helicopters, B-26 bombers from the Indonesian fiasco, tens of thousands of rifles and other weapons, C-46, C-54 and other Air America-supported heavy transport aircraft, U-2 operations over Indochina, radar and other clandestine equipment, C-130s specially modified for deep Tibetan Operations, and much more. From the point of view of the CIA, the helicopters were simply the tip of the iceberg, and the decision was its most important in that decade.

Typically, in his unwitting Mother Superior-style, which included bulldog tenacity, Dulles chose the route to the White House. Here again he could rely strongly on Frank Hand. Working with Hand in Erskine's office was the CIA's other best agent, Major General Edward G Lansdale, who had long served in the CIA. Like Hand, he had unequaled contacts in the Department of State and in the White House. In support of Dulles, they contacted their friends there and began a subtle and powerful move destined to prepare the way for what would appear to be a decision by President Eisenhower. This was an important feature of the "case study": The apparent Presidential decision.

When the CIA wants to do something for which it does not have prior approval and for which it does not have legal sanction, it works from the bottom, using all of its guile with security and "need to know",a euphemism for "keep the scheme away from anyone at any level of government who might stand in its way."

Hand and Lansdale, among others, were almost always able to line up enough support in the right places to make it possible for the CIA to get a favorable reading from the "Forty Committee" on any subject, legal or not.

In fact, this is the great weakness of such a committee. Rather than working to control the agency it works the other way. The procedure makes it possible for the agency to win approval from a lesser echelon of the NSC infrastructure and then by clamping on a security lid, it makes others believe that the CIA had orders from the NSC, or perhaps even from the President, when in fact it did not.

Thus it was that, about two weeks from the day that I received that first call requesting the movement of the squadron of helicopters, I received word from General Erskine that he had been ''officially" informed that the White House (Forty Committee) had approved the secret operation. The helicopters were moved into Vietnam. They were the first of thousands.

The great significance of this incident is to point out how the CIA works powerfully, deftly, and with great assurance at any level of our government to get anything it wants done, but the anecdote shows only the surface coating of the application of the CIA apparatus.

One year earlier, in 1959, Frank Hand had directed a Boston banker to my office. At that time I worked in the Directorate of Plans in Air Force headquarters and my work was top secret. Few of my contemporaries in the Pentagon knew that I was in charge of a global U.S. Air Force system created for the dual purpose of providing Air Force support for the CIA and for protecting the best interests of the USAF while performing that task. My door was labeled simply, "Team B"; yet that Boston banker knocked and entered with assurance. Somehow he knew what my work was and he knew that I might be able to help him. In 1959 there were very few helicopters in all of the services, and military procurement of those expensive machines was at an all-time low.

The Bell Helicopter Company was all but out of business, and its parent company’ Bell Aerospace Corp., was having trouble keeping it financially afloat. Meanwhile, the shrewd Roy Little, President of the Providence-based Textron Company, had a good cash position and could well afford the acquisition of a loser. Textron and the First National Bank of Boston got together to talk helicopters. Neither one knew a thing about them. But men in First Boston were close to the CIA, and they learned that the CIA was operating helicopters in Laos. What they needed to know now was, "What would be the future of the military helicopter, and would the use of helicopters in South East Asia escalate if given a little boost - such as moving a squadron from Laos to Vietnam?" The CIA could tell them about that, and Frank Hand would be the man who could get them to the right people in the Pentagon.

The banker from Boston phrased his questions as though he believed that the helicopters in Laos were somehow operating under the Air Force, and then went on to ask about their tactical significance and about the possible increase of helicopter utilization for that kind of warfare. This was at a time when not even newspapers had reported anything like the operation of such large and expensive aircraft in that remote war. We had a rather thorough discussion and then he left. He called me several times after that and visited my office a month or two later. As the record will show, Textron did acquire the Bell Helicopter Company and the CIA did step up use of helicopters to the extent that one of the CIA's own proprietary companies, Asia Aeronautics Inc., had more than four thousand men on each of two bases where helicopters were maintained. Most of those men were involved in their maintenance of Bell Helicopters, no less!

Orders for Bell Helicopters for use in Vietnam exceeded $600 million. Anyone wanting to know more about how the U.S. got so heavily ($20 billion and the loss of 58,000 American lives) involved in Indochina need look no further. This was the pattern and the plan.

At the present time, when the White House, the House, and the Senate are all investigating the CIA, it is important to understand the CIA and to put it all in the proper perspective. It is not the President who instructs the CIA concerning what it will do. And in many cases it is not even the Director of Central Intelligence who instructs the CIA.

The CIA is a great, monstrous machine with tremendous and terrible power. It can be set in motion from the outside like a programmer setting a Computer in operation, and then it covers up what it is doing when men like Frank Hand, the real movers, put grease on the correct gears. And in a majority of cases, the power behind it all is big business, big banks, big law firms and big money.

The agency exists to be used by them. Let no one misunderstand what I mean. It was President Lyndon B. Johnson who on more than one occasion said that the CIA was "operating a damn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean." In other words, he knew it was doing this and he was the President! This knowledge has been recently confirmed by Defense Secretary James Schlesinger (who is a former head of the CIA) and others by their admission that they told the agency to end all "termination's". But Lyndon Johnson was powerless to do anything about it. This is an astounding admission from a president, the very man from whom, the CIA says, it always gets its instructions.

The present concern over "domestic surveillance" and such other lean tidbits - most important to you and me as they are - is not important to the CIA. It can easily dispense with a James Angleton or even a Helms or a Colby.

(just look at the list Of CIA bigwigs who have been fired; Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, Dick Bissell, Dick Helms, and now perhaps Colby); but the great machine will live on while Congress digs away at the Golden Apples tossed casually aside by the CIA - the supreme Aphrodite.

Of them all notice that the agency cares little about giving away ''secrets" in the form of cleverly written insider books such as those by Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee. The CIA just makes it look as though it cared with some high-class window dressing. Actually the real harm to the American public from those books is to make people believe that certain carefully selected propaganda is true.

In the story of Frank Hand we come much closer to seeing exactly how the CIA operates to control this government and other foreign governments. It is still operating that way. Today it is President Ford who is the unwitting accessory.

gchq · Posted: Mon Nov 08, 2004 10:13 am Post subject: INTERVIEW WITH JOSEPH SPIELER

INTERVIEW WITH JOSEPH SPIELER

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Col. L. Fletcher Prouty (Ret.) is no stranger to Gallery readers. A former liaison officer between the Pentagon and the CIA, and later Director of Special Plans (clandestine operations) in the Office of the joint Chiefs of Staff, Col. Prouty wrote exclusive. controversial articles for Gallery's recent September and October issues. They made news headlines by revealing new and alarming facts concerning CIA assassinations and the murder of John F. Kennedy. But Col . Prouty's career background in the upper echelons of the military- espionage complex has provided him a rare vantage point from which to witness behind-the-scenes activities on a much broader range of international events.

This interview, conducted by Gallery's Senior Editor, F. Joseph Spieler, elicits from Col. Prouty his recollections of first-hand experiences, as well as his informed views regarding their profound political implications. Long before the ClA's involvement in Watergate became known, Col. Prouty's book "The Secret Team", warned of its dangerous and illegal activities. The nation's newspapers hailed it as "a blockbuster," and reported that it has "the cold ring of truth about it." We believe you will find the same to be true of this interview.

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Spieler: You have contended in your book, The Secret Team, that our government has been under the influence of a "secret team" for more than fifteen years. What is this team? What are its dimensions? Where does it operate, and how?

Prouty: The secret team is a group of men who can orchestrate the activities of the United States government. They are not always the same men. But they are always from the same areas of interest industry, big business, the military, big banks, big lawyers. Through their ability to direct the activities of key people, they manipulate government policy and have probably done so since 19S9 or 1960. Certainly since the murder of Jack Kennedy in 1963.

Spieler: Does this secret team have a planning directorate? Does it meet on a regular basis to decide what the team is going to do?

Prouty: There are two ways to answer that. The secret team -at least its strongest operators-does meet. They understand each other thoroughly. But actually the secret team does not operate from a master plan. It is the type of operation that takes advantage of opportunities on a gigantic scale in the Vietnam war, the energy crisis, the coming war in the Middle East. Those are the types of things the secret team manipulates.

Now, I wouldn't say that they really planned any of them per se. But they took advantage of existing situations and provided the spark that turned them into major conflagrations, and profited immensely. The Vietnam war could have been a small thing. It didn't need to become a major disaster. There was no reason for it; we know that now.

Spieler: You said the CIA is the Linchpin of the secret team. Can you explain that?

Prouty: The best way to explain that is to give an example. There was no plan, to give an example. There was no plan, or no objective, in the Vietnam war. It started out as a CIA operation in 1954 and eventually General Westmorelandhad 550,000 troops there. But he was never told to conquer this area or break up this army or capture Hanoi so that the war would be over. There was no objective. The war was fought for consumption, for $220-billion worth of equipment. And that's money. That's power. And it all grew out of a CIA intelligence operation.

Another example is Sputnik. What did Sputnik really mean? To the CIA it meant a tremendous missile gap. This started the country on an all-out program to build missiles better than the Russians.Who was gathering all that intelligence about Soviet missile capability? The CIA was. So we went and built bigger ones, bigger intermediate-range missiles, bigger intercontinental missiles, bigger undersea missiles. just so long as they were bigger, longer, range, and more of them. And, of course, as far as the secret team was concerned. that meant hundreds of billions of dollars instead of tens of billions of dollars. But it needed the CIA to "discover" the missile gap. And this is the role of the CIA-spurring the secret team on to its greatest capability, which is response to a ''threat."

Spieler: Response?

Prouty: The secret team responds to these emergencies. It responded to the petroleum shortage. Remember, the petroleum shortage supposedly came about when Saudi Arabia announced it would withhold petroleum from anyone who was friendly to the Israelis after the October 1973 war. All of a sudden our government decided we had a shortage of oil . But before that we didn't have a shortage of oil, and after a few months, when the price had been tripled, we didn't have a shortage of oil anymore. No new wells were dug. Nothing really happened except that there was a "response" to a "crisis".

Spieler: But wasn't the petroleum crisis real in the sense that if Saudi Arabiawithheld oil from us we would not have had the petroleum to continue our normal economy?

Prouty: We had been getting less than 10 percent of our oh from Saudi Russia We increased imports from such places as Nigeria immediately and covered that 10 percent right away. Obviously, we had some concern over western Europe's demands, which is more dependent on Saudi Arabia. But the countries that supply the oil were under our control. The countries that are most under the control of the CIA are Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Iran. Those are major oil suppliers.

Spieler: You say these governments cannot exist without CIA support?

Prouty: Saudi Arabia, for instance, with a small population, is controlled absolutely by a royal family. And that royal family is guarded - a double meaning - by an elite force trained by a civilian contractor of the U.S. government, and that elite force has been trained by the CIA for years.

Anybody who trains the elite guard of the king and his family controls the country. We trained the elite guard of President Diem in Vietnam. And when the guard started to break up in 1963, the Diem regime ended, because there was nobody to protect him. We have controlled and trained the guard of King Hussein in Jordan. Now, if that guard should begin to deteriorate because our support was withdrawn, King Hussein wouldn't live two weeks.

Spieler: So you are saying that if Washington had really been on the side of the oil consumer instead of the oil producer, the President would have told the CIA: "Look, tell those people in Saudi Arabia and Iran to behave - or else !"

Prouty: Sure, there's no reason they couldn't have done that.

Spieler: Does the secret team prevent us from breaking the oil cartel?

Prouty: Well, our government is in cahoots with the cartel. In fact, our government is the cartel. The government that is running us, the secret government. Look at it this way: the price of Arabian oil sets the price for the rest of the oil producers. And our own oil producers in the United States don't have to pay those huge transoceanic transportation costs. That means stupendous profits.

But don't forget the bankers. Did you ever think about whom you pay when you buy a barrel of oil from Arabia? Do you pay the government of Saudi Arabia? Do you pay the king? Do you pay Aramco? Whom do you pay? And if you pay $10 .65, how much does the king get? Most of that money never even leaves the U.S. What you do is you transfer accounts, say from Chase Manhattan Bank to Morgan Guaranty Trust, okay? Then the company ships the oil. The Arabs tax the company or they charge so much for that oil, call it what you will. Aramco gets the rest. Aramco is not Saudi Arabia. Aramco is a commercial firm So you don't pay an Arabian sheik $10.65 for every barrel of oil coming out.

Most of that money stays right in Morgan Guaranty Trust or Chase Manhattan, and becomes a function of the assets of that bank. A large amount of the Arab account is used, say, to buy aircraft from Boeing or from Lockheed. So back it comes into another U.S. account. So what you pay at the gas pump ends up buying military aircraft. I have the Aramco handbook, a thick book as big as the Encyclopedia Brittanica. It shows all the oil franchises in the Middle East. All those franchises are either British Petroleum, Shell, or United States companies. So you know goddamned well that when you buy that of you're just paying an American company. Of course, the Arab is getting his share, but he's not getting all of it. He's not even getting most of it.

Spieler: You have said the secret team is multinational, international

Prouty: Yes, that is a major reason for its need to take over the Presidency.

Spieler: And what's in it for them? Just the money?

Prouty: Power, money.

Spieler: And you would identify these interests as banks?

Prouty: Yes.

Spieler: And oil?

Prouty: Yes.

Spieler: And heavy manufacturing, aerospace?

Prouty: All of them. But in our frustration about the way things are going we have overlooked something which is terribly important. I'm not trying to say that a couple of bankers in New York. or Howard Hughes in Las Vegas are running this country. I'm more worried about who isn't running it.

Spieler: But you're also saying the other, that there is a conspiracy.

Prouty: Sure. But the control of the Presidency diverts the President. It weakens the President. It leaves no one with legal responsibility in control. It's kind of like fun and games to titillate yourself with the idea that Johnson didn't run the economy or that Nixon didn't run it or that Ford isn't running it, but really that's peanuts. It's our lives, the quality of our lives, our society all that is much more important. And then you begin to see why things break down, because if this government which we pay $300 billion a year to function is just doing nothing while somebody up at the top is interested in other things, then the whole effort is worthless.

This begins to explain why strange things happen. like in our agricultural programs, where we gave away billions of dollars of wheat on a bad deal, and why the Federal Reserve Bank seems to be unresponsive to the needs of the country. Then things begin to fall apart and you say, "Well goddamn, nobody's running the place." Or else there are people who aren't qualified running it. You've got a funny kind of government when it is being run from somewhere in the middle. Somebody making a decision on interest rates; not the President or the Secretary of the Treasury. Somebody down there in an office made a decision on agriculture-not the President. Not Congress. See, the whole thing begins to break when you recognize this kind of a total breakdown of the system. And I think that's why we've had such a strange fifteen years, from 1960 to 1975.

Spieler: And you think the system has broken down?

Prouty: It's obvious. Already we've got a President and a Vice-President that weren't elected. It seemed to have come about in a rather natural way. But if you think about it, it didn't. That's a breakdown. A serious breakdown.

Now we've got to set up an election in the next year or so and I think you're going to find out that it is going to be very hard to do. When you find out that the Democrats have eleven men running for President, it really means that they've got nobody running, doesn't it? Why? Does somebody call them up it night and say, "Hey, do you want to hear what a gun sounds like? Bang!" and hang up the phone? That would stop a man right there.

Spieler: Do you think that sort of thing happens?

Prouty: It doesn't have to happen. It has happened. It happened to George Wallace. It happened to Bobby Kennedy. All the men running for President have memories. No, I don't think they have to be that blunt. When they laid that horse's head on the bed in The Godfather, it wasn't because they wanted to sell him another horse. But after that he knew that anything he owned-including his life-was in jeopardy to whoever put that horse's head on the bed. Once that happens, they don't have to remind you. it's a technique of a Mafia-type organization. You hurt somebody real bad and he'll line up with you .

I remember once in World War II, we were up in Italy and these Gurkhas, these tribesmen who fought for the British Army, used knives-they were good with rifles, but they used knives. And one night they slipped into a German camp, a small camp with an outpost, and they slit the throat of every other man. The next morning when the rest of those Germans woke up, all you could hear was them breaking camp. getting the hell out of there. Nothing had ever been as effective against them as that. Every other man. You can imagine what the guys who lived told the rest of the guys:

"Get the hell out of here, there's some madmen on the other side." That's what's effective. That horse's head on the end of the bed ends all your problems. And that's why I say the 1976 election will be a sham, thanks to the cabal in power.

Spieler: How many people make up the cabal, the secret team?

Prouty: I would say that is probably immaterial, but in my own mind I would say it is somewhere between fifty and two hundred. Five or six bankers in New York, but they are on boards of other companies and so they double up. I don't think it would take more than fifty to two hundred people to run the whole thing. I mean, at the top.

Spieler: so then the process of the secret team is really not that mysterious.It is one that is pretty well known, and actually pretty above-board, if I understand you correctly. That is to say, the President meets with bankers on a regular basis. He meets with the giants of industry. He meets with heads of munitions-makers. And this way secret team lobbies and pressures the President to get what it wants. Or is that more sinister than that ?

Prouty: No, he is their client, their figurehead .

Spieler: But they never tell him that, do they?

Prouty: They don't need to, he knows it. Like Lyndon Johnson. He was a real good example. Lyndon Johnson took over the Presidency with blood spattered on him from John F. Kennedy's murder. He learned a lesson right there. From that time on he was a pretty mild man. Because he knew they had already used the gun. There was really quite a change in character. A guy who had been running for office all his life decides not to run for reelection. The one office he probably loved the most, or aspired to the most.

Spieler: You don't think it was because of the Vietnam War?

Prouty: No. Johnson refused to stay under the guns of the conspiracy. And then who was he followed by? Another man who was tainted by the same thing. A man who was in Dallas on the same day. A man who knew about the impact of those bullets as well as Johnson did: Richard Nixon.

Spieler: When do you think the secret team got started?

Prouty: Well, the first ideas began to form during the Korean war. The scheme was perfected and began to pay off about 1959. By 19591 would say it was beginning to coalesce. They had learned, these industrial giants, bankers, lawyers, and military, that they could get big contracts from the government by ignoring or overriding normal policy and constraints. The first really big one was the TFX and that began in 1959 but did not reach payoff until 1962. The "TFX" was to be a really big one. That was a $6.2 billion contract was unheard of. There had never been a contract anything like that before. But it was at that time that the thing began to work for the secret team

Spieler: Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex. You said he was had in the U-2 flight by Francis Gary Powers over the Soviet Union.

Prouty: I think that the U-2 incident was the opening signal of the reversal of power in this country.

Spieler: The beginning of the secret team?

Prouty: The first major move of the team. Eisenhower was planning to meet with Khrushchev in the "Ultimate Summit Conference." There were very elaborate arrangements made for that meeting. By that I mean arrangements between the USA and the USSR and with Germany, France, England, Italy, Canada, Australia. Eisenhower was pinning his forty-five years of government service on the success of that meeting. It was to be the culmination of his life of service. He called it the "Crusade for Peace," and Khrushchev was doing the same thing in Russia. Plans were made for a mid-May meeting in Paris. But a tremendous amount of very powerful opposition had developed in this country. The last thing the people in the armaments business wanted to see was an era of peace.

Well, the U-2 incident took place right on May Day in 1960. Notice it happened on May Day, the Russian equivalent of the Fourth of July. The Soviet's big day. It just blew the whole thing right out of the water. Well, I know from my secret work, from being inside those operations. that the U-2 was an illegal flight. The U-2 operators had been told not to launch any over-flights before the summit conference. In spite of these direct orders I know that four men put that U-2 in the air. They gave the orders. They were able to give orders that others could not countermand because they made it appear that the orders had come from higher up.

Spieler: Do you know who they are?

Prouty: Yes, but for legal reasons I can't name them here. That flight, you know, was a weird flight. Everything was different. Everything was wrong. Things that ordinarily were done correctly and routinely were overlooked. One of the simplest things was part of a normal precaution. We had a vacant room, I mean bare floor and everything.

The pilot for the day was selected from several pilots. They would not know who was going beforehand. This was done to forestall attempts at irregularities. Then the selected pilot would walk in the door. He would meet a doctor there. The doctor would say, "Stop. We'll check you to make sure you're ready for the flight."

So he strips. Doesn't have anything on. They take his rings off. They take his watch off. Then they give him a brief physical test which is just a cover story. Then they say, "Okay, Gary, you're ready for the flight. Never mind the stuff you wore in here. You come over here." And he would be told to put on clothes, all the way from socks and shorts on up, a flying suit and other equipment which had been manufactured from materials made, for example, in India, buttons made in Norway, and a zipper made in Japan. The government wants to be able to disclaim any connection with him, what they call "plausible denial". And so he gets into this suit of clothes, no pockets, no I D cards, no billfold, no nothing And off he goes. Now that's routine. That's the normal procedure.

But what did Gary Powers have? He had his entire identification in his billfold: his driver's license, his P.X. card, his Pilots license. He had such ridiculous things as a needle that was supposed to permit him to kill himself. But he also had a parachute to save his life. In a flight as sensitive as that, the reason they would put the pilot in untraceable clothes and otherwise "sterilize" the airplane is the assumption that if he crashes he's dead, probably burned, probably blown up. They don't expect him to be alive. And the Russians wouldn't be able to prove he was an American.

Spieler: Then somebody wanted to blow the flight?

Prouty: Sure. The evidence lies in all of these abnormal procedures. It's simple to make the U-2 come down. You can make any plane come down, if you know how to tamper with it. Look at the place in which it came down-in Sverdlovsk, the very center of the western part of the Soviet Union. Ideal, like having it come down in Kansas City. That's precision. That didn't lust happen. That's why Powers has never been able to give a good story about how he came down.

One of the most discreet ways to tamper with a U-2 is to play with its hydrogen system. Because it operates at such a high altitude, the U-2 engine processes a trace amount of hydrogen in the fuel system. This hydrogen supports combustion at extremely high altitudes. It was my job, among others, to move this liquid hydrogen to U-2 bases at the time the planes were being operated. Liquid hydrogen was moved to Pakistan before this flight. Now, if only enough liquid hydrogen was put in that airplane to get it as far as the vicinity of Sverdlovsk, it would come down with about 80 to 90 percent certainty.

Spieler: Did the U-2 incident tip off Eisenhower to the existence of the secret team, or do you think' he knew about it beforehand?

Prouty: I would say at that time, May 1, 1960, that Eisenhower had a feeling, a gut sense, that there were very strong powers within the government and outside pressures working against him. After all, he spoke about it just before he left office, when he made the speech warning the country against the military-industrial complex. We'd have been in pretty good shape if it had not been for the U-2 and the busted Summit. Just think if you could wipe out the decade of the Sixties, and take off instead from where we were in '58, '59

And then if we had been able to keep on that curve we'd be in Pretty good shape in this country. Just think how much better things would be now if we had not blown the $220 billion in the Vietnam debacle. The U-2 flight was the first bad overt move.

Spieler: Do you think the Vietnam War-turning it from an instance in which we were providing some help to another country to one in which we got massively committed-was engineered?

Prouty: There can be no doubt but that the secret team-CIA combination set us-up and maneuvered us into the Vietnam war. First of all, they got the upper hand over the waning Eisenhower administration in the latter part of 1960 after the U-2 incident. While Nixon maneuvered behind the scenes, the CIA, with the assistance of such CIA-oriented military personnel as Gen. Edward G. Lansdale and Gen. Samuel Wilson, began to build up the Army Special Forces-the Green Berets.

Many people believe the Green Berets were resurrected from their post Korean war activity by JFK. This is not true. After the CIA got things rolling, James Douglass, formally reopened the Special Forces Center and school at Fort Bragg in the latter part of 1960, before Kennedy took office.

This was an important move, because it assured the CIA of the manpower, the troops it would need to escalate activity in Vietnam. At the same time the CIA began to move agents and operatives from Laos to Vietnam and they took the only heavy helicoptern squadron in Laos with them. The Department of Defense would not let the CIA take the Marines from Thailand to Vietnam to maintain the helicopters. so the CIA bust up a huge maintenance base with its clandestine airline, Air America, in Vietnam.

All of this was in motion before JFK became President. The CIA deserted the Meo tribesmen in Laos, deserted the courageous Khambas in Tibet, and moved its military assets into Vietnam. Then after JFK was elected. and after the Cuban Bay of Pigs disaster. the CIA moved all of its extensive military assets-planes, weapons. helicopters, the Army Green Berets, the Air Force Air Commandos from secret bases in Latin America to Vietnam. The stage was thus secretly set for the escalation of the war in Vietnam.

Spieler: You seem to flinch every time you mention the war in Vietnam. Why?

Prouty: I didn't know it showed. But you're right. It's hard to call that disaster a "war. " It was a mess, it was a not it was bedlam. It was a system-a gigantic maw designed to grind up $220-billion of military equipment. You can call it any word you want. It was shadow boxing, when you really think about it. Here we had hundreds and hundreds of airplanes, we had artillery hub to hub, we had tanks all over the place, and what did the other guy have? Black pajamas and our captured weapons.

We got in there in 1954 and the shooting was going pretty good by '65, when the marines landed. But all of that time the action was controlled by the a A. It was always called ''clandestine, peacetime," or "paramilitary".

The senior man in Vietnam was the CIA Station Chief, who was equal to a commanding general. And to referee between the CIA and the military, we always kept an ambassador in Saigon. An ambassador is about as useful as your socks in a shower during a real wartime situation. But we kept an ambassador there all the time. Well, a definition of war is that when diplomacy fails, war starts. But when a diplomat is running things, you don't have a real war, by definition. It was really a strange mess. What it was a niceplace to spend $220-billion... and to rip off about $5O-billion.

Let me give you a picture of Vietnam that explains this as well as anything I know . in Vietnam we had a harbor called Cam Ranh Bay, remembers Well, there is no natural harbor on the east coast of Indochina because the oceans and the tides aren't right. The geography isn't right. But some men in Washington decided to convince the President that they could make a harbor. So, for $2-billion they went over there and dug a harbor. The water was so shallow they couldn't get boats into it. So they dug a channel. I know the east coast of Vietnam you can go a mile out to sea standing up in the water. But these guys convinced the President to spend $2-billion to dig a hole in the mud in Cam Ranh Bay. Today you can't get a ship in and out of Cam Ranh Bay. It silted back in again. They didn't do a damned thing. But they made their 52-billion.

And, of course, they brought supplies in there. Now the North Vietnamese have got those supplies. I was sent by the Secretary of Defense to the of GALL of the man made the proposal for the harbor. And I told him then, "I know the coast of Vietnam and you can't put a ship in there." "Oh, don't worry, Colonel Prouty, we're going to fix that up." They fixed it, all right. Two billion dollars wasted. Thrown away. We got ships in and out for the war, but as you can see, the war was wasted, too. And that $2-billion was only the beginning.

They spent more money trying to keep the harbor open. Every time there was a typhoon it washed the harbor out. See, those bastards didn't care whether the harbor helped the war or not. They got a 52-billion contract.

Spieler: And you say that for that kind of money the secret team planned the assassination of John Kennedy?

Prouty: Not quite that way. To put it more precisely, I would say that they made it possible for the assassination to happen, they let it happen. And there has been no prosecution of the real assassins.

Spieler: You mean that the team knew about the assassination in advance?

Prouty: They may have known that there were people who would kill him. If you make it possible for the people who would kill him to do it by controlling the Secret Service, seeing to it that the agents are not there in full strength you are letting it happen.Someone was in a position to say to the head of the Secret Service, "Say, Mac, Kennedy is going to Dallas, and they like him down in Dallas. Lyndon Johnson is going with him. I don't think you need to send a couple hundred guys down and do the regular job in Dallas, Put eight or ten guys in the car. and everything will be all right." Well, a guy with that kind of power can set up an assassination any time, just by seeing to it that the Secret Service isn't there.

Spieler: This is your theory of "the power of the negative. Can you expand on that?

Prouty: Sure. The power to see to it that regular government operations don't occur is one of the greatest controls over power you can wield in a government. Let's be specific. There are ways that the government today could see to it that the price of bread would be lower than it is. You know, seeing to it that there was more competition let into the market. But no one makes a move. Or the power to prosecute. Look how many people there are today, like those in Watergate who go unprosecuted.

The Watergate case has been tried as a cover-up, but not the crime committed in Watergate. Who were Hunt and McCord and the Cubans and Liddy really working for? They accuse all these people of covering up the fact that they were working for somebody, but somebody has the power to withhold prosecution. It is a power-controlled government, even to the point of killing a President.

Spieler: Why would the conspirators have wanted Kennedy killed?

Prouty: Well, I think the most obvious answer is to say that they represented power groups, power centers that were not getting what they wanted under Kennedy's administration They were different groups than the ones that Kennedy was working with. Furthermore, Kennedy had already announced that he was downgrading the Vietnam war. He had already announced that he wanted to tear the CIA was killed because he was the President.

Whoever killed him conspired to kill him in order to take over and control the office of the President of the United States. But it wouldn't do them any good to just have a dead President. When you kill a President, what is important is the control you have over the successor. They wanted control of Lyndon Johnson and that is why Lyndon Johnson was in that Dallas procession.

Spieler: With so much doubt surrounding the findings of the Warren Commission it's been twelve years now, why did the Kennedy family never question it?

Prouty: Well, Bobby Kennedy probably didn't accept it, so he was killed, and the rest of the Kennedy family learned quite a lesson. You understand that bullets kill people, so you accept the report and you don't say a word, you keep quiet. That's why Teddy Kennedy won't be able to run for President.

continued...

gchq · Posted: Mon Nov 08, 2004 10:14 am Post subject:

continuation...

Spieler: You don't think Teddy Kennedy will run?

Prouty: Not a chance.

Spieler: Because he's too frightened?

Prouty: He has guts, like the others, but he's a pragmatist. If he does run, I would think he sold out somehow. I would have to. If he runs I can't vote for him. If he runs he probably got a deal.

Spieler: You have said privately that there were two plots during the 1972 election to kill Senator George McGovern if it began to look as if he would win? What can you say about this?

Prouty: Well, you remember in the Watergate hearings and in the developments incidental to the Watergate hearings, there had been entry into the Democratic National Committee Headquarters and into McGovern's own office, and they had people in McGovern's office working against him. Among the plots that were devised during that period was one to kill McGovern. Now, they never had to put it into effect and the people involved didn't go any further because McGovern was so weak that he wasn't really a threat. But he would have been killed if he had been a real threat, like George Wallace.

Spieler: Is there anything more you are willing to say about it?

Prouty: No.

Spieler: Does McGovern know that there was a plot, two plots, against his life during the campaign?

Prouty: I never talked to McGovern. I doubt that he knew about it during the campaign .

Spieler: Do-you think that any of the assassinations or attempted assassinations were just the work of crackpots?

Prouty: There's no doubt about them all being the same thing. There were too many similar elements, and they allhad the same goal: control of the Presidency.

Spieler: And the secret team needs a President it can influence?

Prouty: That is the secret team's philosophy. They own all the oil, so when the price goes up they only make more profit. They can't lose. They own airplane factories. So when there is another order for aircraft, S6-billion or S10-billion, they are the beneficiaries. The great wealth centers are the beneficiaries.

When you accept that idea, you see that the team doesn't need to have a leader. It owns almost everything that matters. It is a worldwide monopoly. They benefit from everything that happens. They remain in power and they have the country and the world in the palm of their hand. It is a committee, a dub. And its composition may vary.

Spieler: How do the big industrialists make contact with the CIA?

Prouty: Well, let's take a look at the CIA. Allen Dulles came from the biggest law firm in the world, Sullivan and Cromwell, in New York. Now Sullivan and Cromwell has as clients the biggest banks, the biggest businessmen in the world. The Dulles brothers, Allen and John Foster, worked in that environment and understood those people. Take John McCone, one of the biggest industrialists in the United States. He, too, was head of the CIA.

Spieler: What industry does John McCone run?

Prouty: McCone at one time was the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, and he is today a major businessman. The number of corporate boards of directors of which he is a member is enormous. He is one of the strongest industrialists in the United States. And he was head of the CIA. Another one was Admiral William Raborn. Now people wondered why he should have been head of the CIA. But remember it was Raborn who worked with industry-U.S. Steel, Hercules Powder, and the Lockheed Company specifically to create what is now called the Polaris program. The Polaris program was the beginning of the submarine nuclear force program that is now a multi-billion dollar industry. Raborn was thus an ideal man to head the CIA.

Spieler: When was this?

Prouty: Raborn was the Director of Central intelligence immediately following Allen Dulles' dismissal. He is the kind of man that industry wants. The same applies, to a different degree, to [former CIA Director]Richard Helms and [current Director] William Colby. They were brought up in this community; it is the area in which they have spent their entire working lives.

So there is no question about business connections, such as with ITT and the copper interests or the oil industry. If these industries need information from the CIA, they have it.

Spieler: So in your mind, there is no derision between the top levels of government and the top levels of industry-they are managed by the same people.

Prouty: They come and go. They just sit in different chairs. One of the best examples is William Simon, Secretary of the Treasury. People forget, or don't know, that Simon was a Wall Street broker, an effective man, a good representative of the Wall Street community. So he was moved into Washington as a member of a committee to study energy problems under the then head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Dixy Lee Ray. Now Simon's committee developed a $10-billion energy program. Simon moved from the committee to be head of the Federal Energy Office when we went into our energy crisis. And he moved from there to be Secretary of the Treasury. Simon is there working for Wall Street, and he is doing one hell of a good job. He is one of Wall Street's best graduates and a really powerful man. His role has been to be a top-level industry contact man in big government. Simon could head the CIA when Colby leaves.

Spieler: If William Simon is one of Wall Street's best-placed operatives in the government, how come the stock market is still down?

Prouty: it has nothing to do with the stock market. The secret team doesn't play the stock market. The stock market is a toy.

Spieler: A toy for whom?

Prouty: For you and me. The big guys don't need to buy their own stock. They own industries. I don't think members of the secret team worry a lot about the price of stock.

Spieler: Would you say that we've lost quite a bit of economic freedom in the last decade?

Prouty: I'll tell you what we have lost. We have been paving a lot more taxes than we should. Money that should have gone into the quality of our own lives was soaked up in Vietnam. And remember, the high price of gasoline today is just another way of collecting taxes. We used to send military aid to Iran and Saudi Arabia now we send them windfall billions of dollars and they use those dollars to buy arms. It's the same money. Only the arms manufacturers collect it at the gas pump instead of collecting it with anInternal Revenue Service form. We're being soaked for this game. for these people who make all that military equipment, much of it worthless in war.

Let's say that instead of paving $7,000 in taxes last year you had paid a legitimate amount maybe $3,000. And let's say that instead of gasoline costing fifty or sixty cents it costs thirty-five cents. You would have had extra thousands for your own use.

There's where the destruction of your freedom is, in the quality of your life and in sweating it out every day to see whether you're going to make ends meet, to see whether people are going to have jobs simply because the economy has been hit too hard, first by Vietnam and now by inflation fanned by this "oil crisis." And all the time the military budget goes up. People don't analyze the military budget. Let's consider some glaring examples.

The Russians have an airplane, the Mig-25 "Foxbat," which will do 2,200 miles an hour and more. If they can do 2,200 miles an hour, we have not got the right to pay for the production of any fighter in this country that can't do 2,201 miles an hour and better. We're wasting billions of dollars on crud.

Spieler: What about the F-16?

Prouty: It will do about 1,800 miles an hour, when it's built. Remember there are only a few of them flying now. Air superiority means just what it says.

When Foxbat flew at the Paris AirShow, doing 2,200 miles an hour and breaking the world's speed record, all they were saying was, "Up-yours. boys, we've got it. We got an airplane." The B-1 bomber is a Mach 2 bomber. Mach 2 is somewhere between 1,200 and 1,400 miles an hour. It may do a little better than that Well, what magic will make the B.-1 bomber run away from the Mig-25? Nothing. It's no match Therefore. it's worthless. And no alternative tactics or claims for it will save it in combat. The B-l is most vulnerable to a missile.

In the last Mideast war, the Egyptians knocked the American-built Israeli planes down with missiles. Over Hanoi, a fairly unsophisticated target. we lost 970 F-4's-our best attack plane. And we lost those to the North Vietnamese equipped with Russian missiles.

Let's just say we take F-4's or planes like them, F-14's and F-15's, and we go to war in the Mideast. What do you think Arab forces are going to have against these fighters? The same goddamned Russian missiles, only they're going to have better ones.

The whole thing is a farce, a terrible, terrible farce. You and I have been paying for all of these weapons systems for years, and the only really effective weapons system we have in hand now is the hardened Silo-based missile. Everything else is junk, second-rate junk!

And that's where our freedom goes or the quality of our lives, or whatever you-want to call it...that's why it's so important. I wouldn't mind paying for weapons if they were superior. We used to have the better airplane in the 1950's. We were miles ahead of any Russian plane. But not today. We lost that lead wasting money and technological advantage because of the Vietnam war.

Spieler: So the secret team is reaping immense profits out of material that is essentially worthless?

Prouty: The answer is yes. But you have to be very careful. When I describe the secret team, I credit its success to the failures of the government, not to the fact that the secret team is so brilliant or even dictatorial. There's a fine distinction. What the team does is keep us from having the best of things because they cream off the money The end product is second-rate material.

Spieler: Let's go back to Gary Powers and the U-2. You said this was the first visible evidence of the secret team. That this was the point at which Eisenhower lost control of his own administration, lost control of his own policy. Now this continued, you said. through Kennedy. through Johnson. and through Nixon.

Prouty: Once the events had changed with the U-2, Eisenhower sort of atrophied. By that time it was May of 1960. Within three months Kennedy won the Democratic nomination. This upset the secret team. About April or May there was a strong move by the CIA, and by certain elements of the Army, to regenerate the Special Forces.

This regeneration was put on an expedited basis early in 1960. People attribute the Green Berets to Kennedy. In fact, calling the Fort Bragg Special Forces Camp by the name Kennedy Center was a joke played on JFK by the CIA. They fooled Kennedy, He had not known about their secret build-up in 1960. Kennedy was a nobody then, just a senator. Kennedy had nothing to do with the Special Forces build-up at all. That was another incident like the U-2.

It was another example of something important happening without formal approval. It was another move of the effort towards a major secret action that eventually ended up being called the war in Vietnam.

The anti-Castro movement also started in the Eisenhower era and Kennedy simply inherited it. Anybody that tries to say that President Eisenhower approved the invasion of Cuba has got to be crazy, and anybody who says that Kennedy encouraged the invasion is crazy. He inherited the invasion scenario. Somewhere between the election in November 1960 and the inauguration of Kennedy in January 1961, the Cuban exile support project was made into a Cuban invasion Nixon was in a position to give National Security Council approval, and it may have been Nixon who did it.

The decision was made on Nov. 4, 1960. Anyhow, Kennedy inherited the Bay of Pigs, and he had to be briefed on it. In other words, he did not direct it. Which is much different than what revisionists are saying today.

All of those things were going on before Kennedy became President. They were running pretty near full steam when Kennedy came in, and layer by layer, as he peeled them off, he began to find out about all this maneuvering. It was all clandestine, all under the table. The war in Laos was a secret war up to that time. He didn't know how involved it was. There were60,000 to 70,000 troops involved there with CIA support, supply, and leadership. All native troops, with no more than 3,000 or 4,000 Americans. It was a big war, as clandestine wars go. Kennedy inherited that.

By June 1961 Kennedy had enough. He appointed a high-powered board to review the Bay of Pigs, but it meant reviewing not just the Bay of Pigs, but everything - Laos, Vietnam, the Congo, Tibet, the Green Berets. He ordered Bobby Kennedy to take a look at the whole thing. When they reported to him, Admiral Arleigh Burke, Allen Dulles, General Maxwell Taylor, and Bobby Kennedy were the Board of Inquiry. This group gave Kennedy a pretty good report of what was going on, though part of it was biased because, by that time, Maxwell Taylor was more inclined to represent the ClA's view of things.

Spieler: Maxwell Taylor was really representing the CIA?

Prouty: More than anything else. He had left the Army in a huff a couple of years before. He came back more interested in the Green Beret approach, which was the CIA approach to counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency became the new catchword of the Kennedy administration. The only trouble was they did not really know what a Frankenstein they had inherited.

Spieler: What was Taylor's job title?

Prouty: He was on this board to advise President Kennedy about the Bay of Pigs and then he was appointed by JFK to the job that Kissinger has now, the super secret National Security Advisor. After that he became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and later he became Ambassador to Vietnam. He played a very, very key role in this scenario.

Spieler: He was CIA-inspired all the tine?

Prouty: Mostly CIA, right! Bobby Kennedy, having sat through all this, met daily with Kennedy's own Irish Mafia staff. They came to the conclusion that they had to put an end to all this. They wrote three papers, called "National Security Action Memorandums'' - NSAM's. These were important publications of the White House that involved national security action - the highest, most important paper a President can issue on the subject of national defense. One of these was National Security Action Memorandum Number 55, another one was Number 56, another one Number 57. They were very important papers. A suit under the Freedom of Information Act has enabled me to get Number 55. They wouldn't release the others, but I know 57 by heart. I was the responsible officer for processing those papers when they came to the Defense Department so I know what they are.

I'll digress a bit. When Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, it was an indication of the care with which those papers had been edited. The Pentagon Papers was a propaganda deal. Those were not the way the real Pentagon Papers are. Papers were not added, but they were deleted. This changed the whole meaning of what the Papers revealed. The Pentagon Papers did not include NSAM 55, 56, 57. They were cleverly extracted .

Spieler: By whom?

Prouty: By whoever fixed that Pile of junk up for Ellsberg to plant on the U.S. public by way of the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Spieler: Whom do you suspect that was?

Prouty: I've talked to Ellsberg for hours about this. At first he didn't know the source of the papers. You see, it's another one of these negative controls. If I gave you a hundred papers and told you that these were the history of the Mayaguez Affair, you wouldn't know that there were neatly a hundred and the papers and that I extracted five key papers which really gave the key points.

Any "history" can be controlled by extraction. But it's very important, though, to know about NSAM 55, 56,and 57. They were very anti-CIA papers. They were the papers in which Kennedy put into practice what he meant when he said. ''I'm gonna tear the agency into a thousand pieces." He spelled it out in Number 55.

NSAM 55 was addressed directly to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now if you're not in the military business or in government, that might not seem significant. But the President of the United States rarely, if ever, corresponds directly with the Chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff. He corresponds with the Secretary of Defenseand the Secretary of Defense corresponds with the Chairman. Now, if there was a war going on, the President would contact the Chairman directly,because at that time the President is the Commander in Chief. So, you see. what Kennedy was doing was saying, in effect: "I'm Commander in Chief in this situation." indicating that he considered clandestine operations a form of warfare, and he was also saying, "Mr. Chairman, I'm talking to you directly. Now this is what you're going to do. You're going to put the CIA out of this business. I don't want the CIA in this dirty-tricks business anymore. In the event of any peacetime operations, you will be in charge. If we then decide that we're going to put them into operation, we'll either assign them to the military or to somebody else. But the CIA is not going to be in it. " This was a very direct and powerful paper.

Spieler: And what is NSAM 57?

Prouty: NSAM 57 was the other shoe. It was sent to the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State, and a copy was sent to the Director o f Central intelligence, along with a copy to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And in that paper Kennedy explained, in effect: "I have sent the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a paper and directed that he's in charge in the event of any requirement for peacetime operations. And you will all be a team in this thing There will be no clandestine activities at all in this government except those which are small, non-attributable, and essential in the national interest, and that are approved by the National Security Council itself. And they will not be assigned regularly to any special department or agency. They will be as- signed by whatever the need happens to be, if there ever is a need. " NSAM 57 is still so secret you can't even get it today. I worked with it every day and I know exactly what it meant.

This brings us up to June 1961 and shows how Kennedy came head-on against the CIA. It took him that long to realize what was going on. That shaped his thinking from that time on. The thing I'm trying to clear up here is that very few researchers and historians have been able to portray the period From 1959 to 1961 adequately. So much of what was done was done secretly. The Tibetan affair was very secret, and the massive Indonesian affair was secret, as was the Laotian affair. Those were big operations, they weren't just ten men going in on a raid. They involved tens of thousands of men.

Spieler: Can you spend just a minute or two on the Tibetan affair and the Indonesian affair?

Prouty: The Chinese moved into Tibet around '58. The CIA, realizing that there was nothing they could do about the Chinese Army going in, made contact with the Dalai Lama and ingeniously managed to get his royal party out of Lhasa by an overland route that was seldom attempted. They got him into Bhutan and then into India. The way they did it was to instruct every man to leave alone and without any horses or food or other supplies. Thus, they were not stopped and searched. Later, everything they got was air-dropped to them, so that by the time they got out, say fifty or one hundred miles from Lhasa. they were re-equipped. Then they could travel.

Since nobody saw them leave with any equipment, the authorities didn't think it was worth following them, and they escaped. The Dalai Lama's escape aroused the Tibetans. The agency made contact around Lhasa, deep in the Khamba territory-the mountainous southeastern Tibetan territory. The real mountain Tibetans are the Khambas. And then way up north where Tibet, western China, and the Soviet Union come together, was a other area where we dropped agents . We built a special long-range capability into several airplanes for the agency. After a while, the agency was supporting more than 14,000 tribesmen with fuel, ammunition, weapons, and communications equipment. We actually took some of those Tibetans out and trained them in the high mountains of Colorado. That was Tibet. That went on until 1960. When the U-2 went down, Eisenhower ordered us to stop over-flying. And the CIA just deserted them. Like Hungary all over again. When Hungary rose in rebellion in 1956 the CIA just deserted them, too. Indonesia was a little different There the CIA began to work with different island groups until finally they got tens of thousands of Indonesian rebels fighting against President Sukarno. The program was so elaborate that it got out of hand.

Spieler: Sukamo wasn't a Communist then, was he?

Prouty: No. And it didn't make sense. In fact, it was rather unpopular Here was a good example of where the bottom echelons got the top level going and ran away with it. This was in 1958 It was a classic example of how a tremendous clandestine program can boil up from the bottom, without any direction at all. I doubt President Eisenhower ever heard of the thing until it was very late. They must have had a helluva time explaining it to him when it flopped

Spieler: What do you think of the American involvement in Korea?

Prouty: I've never thought our involvement in Korea was really what it seemed to be, because if it was they wouldn't have held MacArthur back. if the objective was to unify Korea, the only way they could do it was to hit the Chinese, because that's where all the enemy supplies were coming from. And you can't beat anyone if you can't knock their supplies out. You see, it goes back to something I said earlier - if you're fighting a war, it's a war. You can't box somebody just lightly and tap them and slap them. if somebody jumps you in an alley you don't turn around and ask him what his intentions are, do you? Well, that's the ridiculous thing about the Korean war. We were bottled up in the Pusan pocket, almost kicked out of there. and then we marched all the way back to the Yalu River. And then some son of a bitch says "Stop." You can t do that in a war. Once you stop before you finish off the enemy, you're whipped. You're whipped by your own leaders. Somebody decided there that half of Korea would be good enough. Then we opened the door for the Russians. Anywhere they tackled us they knew they could have half. They got half of Vietnam, they got half of Greece and Turkey, they got half of Berlin, they got half of Germany, half of Korea. That's worse than the domino theory

Spieler: How did the get half of Greece and Turkey?

Prouty: Well, they're in the process. by means of Cyprus. They'll take their time about it, but by keeping the heat on in Cyprus they're going to get Turkey- key or Greece. See, we're always on one side-we can't be on both sides of a civil war. it's a simple process. Pretty soon, we're backed into a corner. And with every conflict we're one of our areas of influence in half. That's the Soviet game.

Spieler: Let's get back once more to the secret team. How do its members communicate with each other?

Prouty: Like other businessmen. Close to the vest. They understand each other. Elements of the secret team are probably instinctively hostile, but they know how to get along with each other. like a cat and a dog living in the same house. They get feed by the same master, so they better not fight.

Spieler: Give me an example of a cat and a dog.

Prouty: Well, let's just say that Lockheed has a good airplane and McDonnell has a good airplane, and yet they both want to retain access for what you might call the secret team process for the government. They would accept a compromise. I'll give you an example. Do you know how the decision to buy the TFX plane was made - a super 56-billion contest between Boeing and General Dynamics, two of the biggest manufacturers of war materiel in the world? The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had to make the decision, so what he did was to pass the buck over to Lockheed, a competitor that wasn't involved in this struggle. They made the decision. They decided in favor of the aircraft designed by the General Dynamics Corp. Of course, what the public hears is something else. They hear these companies saying, I hired 140,000 men - try feeding them without a government contract. So I'm doing this to keep~140,000 men working. I'm doing it to keep my sub-contractors working. I'm doing it to keep the country running. What do you want? Communism?" That's the old argument from back in 1950. "If you don't buy airplanes do you want to put all these people in the street?" So for lack of a better idea the government buys airplanes. They're trash, but they buy them.

Spieler: Some people would say. "Mr. Prouty, that's Communist thinking."

Prouty: That's a response: if you don't love Nixon, you're a Communist. If you don't love the CIA, you're a Communist. There's another way to see it. There's no distinction between these companies. There's no competition between them.

They're all the Defense Department. When you've got a Lockheed, or a Rockwell International, or a General Dynamics that only make military equipment, then they're the military. When you train the army of the King of Saudi Arabia with a private corporation called "Vinnell," is that Vinnell Corporation a business. or is it part of the military' Just because you're paying them S47-million to train the king's troops doesn't mean they're not just as military as the next guy.

We used to have soldiers do that and we called it military aid. It's just another way of handling the money, that's all. So you want to be careful to define what we are talking about. The whole damn thing is the national military establishment. It's a very interesting concept when you look at it that way.

Spieler: You say that no one man will identify the secret team. Why?

Prouty: No one man will identify the secret team because it is the job of the government to do it. The government Prosecutes-not the individual citizen. If any one man tried to do what the Attorney General ought to do, and list a name, or ten names, or one hundred names, he'd have no means of prosecuting or even beginning the legal mechanism needed to prove that a conspiracy existed. That's why one man can't do it. A man can say, yes, I know people are involved, but that isn't what I mean. We're not naming them. We're trying to identify this grave problem so the government can begin to work on it.

Spieler: Has anybody ever accused you of being a radical?

Prouty: I usually am accused the other way around, of being too conservative, too pro-American.

gchq

An Introduction To The Assassination Business

Sept. 1975 (Nothing changes)

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Assassination is big business. It is the business of the CIA and any other power that can pay for the "Hit" and control the assured getaway. The CIA brags thats its operations in Iran in 1953 led to the pro-western attitude of that important country. The CIA also takes credit for what it calls the "perfect job" in Guatemala. Both successes were achieved by assassination. What is this assassination business and how does it work?

In most countries there is little or no provision for change of political change. Therefore the strongman stays in power until he dies or until he is removed by a coup d'etat, which often means assassination.

For instance, King Fiasal of Saudia Arabia, for all his wealth and seeming power, died from an assassin's bullet even though he was protected by an elite guard trained by a private contractor selected by the United States Department of Defense. This brings up the question of the mechanics.

Foreign assassination, and to a degree domestic assassinations, are set in motion not so much by a specific plan to kill the intended victim, as by efforts to remove or relax the protective organization around the target. Thus, if the CIA secretly lets it be known that it is displeased with a certain ruler and that it would not act against a new regime, some cabal will certainly move against him. Firstly, such CIA sentiment encourages cabals into action and, secondly, it frightens the existing "elite corps". Most palace guards are hated because they are oppressive. When they learn that their CIA support is being removed or weakened, they think of themselves first and begin to head for exile, leaving the ruler vulnerable to the designs of a cabal. This is how the passive "displeasure" of the CIA kills. The same applies to domestic assassinations. Consider the following event.

The autopsy was routine: suicide. A high government official, recently promoted, was found alone in his house, dead and with his rifle beside him. A single bullet had shattered his head. There were no other signs of violence.

A poorly typed note to his wife and son lay on the table near him. The hastily scribbled signature was his own. But the "suicide" was an assassination. After his promotion, the official had found papers in the files of his predecessor that showed that the law had been broken, that huge payoffs had been made, and that cases had been judged on the basis of favoritism and bribery. Consequently, a major industry had suffered grievously. An earlier administration had accepted this corruption as part of its technique of staying in power.

The new official, a fair and honest man, had been deeply troubled by what he had found. He had told his superiors and was stunned when they told him to keep his mouth shut, that they would take care of things. He had begun to drink heavily, and when he was drunk, he had talked. He had become tense. But he worked long hours and went through all the cover-up files. He reconstructed what had happened and prepared a complete report and had just about finished it. He did much of his work late at night at home. On one of those evenings his wife had gone off on a visit and his son was at college. The phone call was calm and official-sounding: "This is the police, have you heard from your son recently? Well, something has happened."

The policeman said he would come right over to talk about it, and added that he was out of uniform and was driving an unmarked car. Yes, he would have identification: Fairfax County Police. The car pulled up quietly. There was a quick knock on the door. The policeman entered, showed his identification and was invited to sit down. At the split second when the official turned to usher the "policeman" into the house, he was hit a sharp blow on the back of the head. He suffered a massive concussion and was dead. The "policeman" went to a closet where he knew a rifle was kept (the house had been well cased). The rest was simple. He hoisted the body up on the end of the rifle with the muzzle in the victim's mouth. One shot blew the top of the head off, removing evidence of the first blow. The suicide note had already been typed on the official's typewriter and the signature had been lifted from another paper signed with a ball point pen.

In moments the "policeman" was on his way. The unmarked car was left in back of the Forrestal building, where it had been taken from a pool of cars, and the assassin was on his way by taxi to Washington National Airport. He shuttled on the last flight to New York. He had already made arrangements for a series of flights that would take him to Athens. Less than twenty-four hours later, he was on the beach south of the city, among old friends and acquaintances in the modern world's equivalent of the Assassin Sect. He was a faceless, professional, multinational "mechanic". He earned good money and was convinced he was doing an essential job for the power center that he believed would save the world from communism.

This story is, in most particulars, true. Some time ago it was revealed that the CIA had been issued a number of identification kits in the name of the Fairfax County, Virginia, police department. This does not necessarily mean the CIA planned to use those identities for the for the purpose of assassination. In fact, it isn't clear what the CIA planned to do with those documents.

The CIA has many gadgets in its arsenal and has spent-years training thousands of people how to use them. Some of these people, working perhaps for purposes and interests other than the CIA's, use these items to carry cut burglaries, assassinations, and other unlawful activities - with or without the blessing of the CIA. Crimes such as these, some of which have remained open for years, cannot be solved by any one individual. But there are patterns and motives that serve to expose methods.

In 1963, about one month before President John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, a prominent Washington lawyer died. It was ruled a suicide because it appeared that he had put his own rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger. His name was Coates Lear, and he was a Law partner of Eugene Zuchert, then Secretary of the Air Force. Lear knew a lot about special airlift contracts and about the plans for Kennedy's fatal visit to Texas. Then, for unexplained reasons, he began drinking excessively. And when he drank, he talked. Soon he was dead.

The same pattern fits the case of William Miles Gingery, the scenario of whose death we have outlined above. He had been promoted to chief of the office of enforcement of the Civil Aeronautics Board. He had found many irregularities in that office when he took over, and he was scheduled to appear before Senator Edward M. Kennedy's Committee of Administrative practices and Procedures.

Gingery, a nondrinker, had begun drinking and was obviously terribly upset. One night he was found dead. His death, in early 1975, was ruled a suicide; it was found that he had put the muzzle of his rifle into his mouth and fired.

These are interesting cases. There were many reasons why both of these men might have been assassinated, and they both died in the same manner. That type of "suicide" is one of the trademarks of the professional "mechanic", the kind of killer who works in the international assassination game.

We hear much today about the CIA and the subject of assassinations. The agency has been linked to the assassination in 1963 of Ngo Dinh Diem, the then President of South Vietnam, and of his brother Nhu. The Diems were killed in October 1963. During the summer of 1971 Charles Colson and E. Howard Hunt, among others, were interested in seeing what could he done to forge and alter official State Department messages to make it appear that President John F. Kennedy was directly implicated in these assassinations. This is an important point. If the White House wanted so badly to tie in a dead president to that plot, it must have known then that President Kennedy was not involved and that the records proved that he wasn't.

The timing of this "dirty tricks" project is interesting. Some months previous, the New York Times had published the Pentagon Papers. The Times version of the Papers contained a somewhat detailed but mixed-up version of the events in Saigon during the late summer of 1963, just before the Diems were killed. Anyone reading those papers carefully would discover that the CIA had been close to the assassination plan and that it had men on the scene. But nowhere in the Pentagon Papers is there any message or directive that states in so many records, "The Diems will be assassinated".

Even lacking this explicit document, many researchers will still conclude that the CIA was mixed up in the affair, and will conclude also that Kennedy did not order the murders. In 1963 Hunt was an active CIA agent and was deeply involved with the then former Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, whom Kennedy had fired.

So when the Nixon White House directed Hunt to forge State Department records in order to make it appear that JFK had directed the assassination of the Diems, the White House knew what it was doing, the CIA knew what it was doing, and Hunt most certainly knew what he was doing. But they goofed. Even if they had succeeded in making it appear that JFK had ordered the killing of the Diems, it would not have stood up, because that is not how political assassinations are done. The clue is that assassination is a murder of an enemy of the sect (and this can mean many things today), and that it is performed as a sacred religious duty. No one has to direct an assassination, it happens. The active role is played secretly by permitting it to happen.

Take the case of the Diems. By the summer of 1963, the Diem regime had been in full control of South Vietnam for ten years and the country was going from bad to worse. By August 1963, memoranda were being circulated in the government; they were unmarked, with no classification, and were hand-carried from person to person. These memos stated such things as, "We must find a way to get rid of the Diems." This was the summer of extreme and fanatical discontent in Vietnam, including Buddhist uprisings and self-immolations.

The situation led to a series of inquiries from the CIA in Washington to Saigon in order to assess the opposition - what its strength might he and whether any of its prospective leaders might be better suited for the interests of the United States than were the Diems.

The CIA, which had placed the Diems in power, was severely split over this problem. One faction wanted to keep Diem and go along with his further demands. Another was ready to drop him and begin again with someone else. There were two favorites in Washington and many more in Saigon. Thus the ground work for an assassination began.

Word got out that the United States "might" withdraw its support of the Diems. This played into the hands of every Saigon cabal. But it did something more important. As the word got out, the people affected most where those who benefited from the Diem regime. The Diems' secret police, their elite guard, and the Diem's inner circle began to realize that they had better move fast. They had been oppressors, murderers. They had stolen hundreds of millions of dollars.

Without the support of the United States, the CIA, and the Diems, these inner elite were dead. As word began to get around Saigon, everyone began to think of evening their scores against the hated Diems. Death was in the air. As the elite began to fade away, the Diems' strength was dissipated rapidly.

Yet in Washington, removed from the harsh reality in Saigon, it seemed only wise to study the situation from every angle. As August gave way to September, President Kennedy vacillated, the State Department did little, and the CIA kept firing out messages to its agents on all sides. Gradually a plan took shape. Madame Nhu, who had ridiculed the Buddhist victims by saying that if they wanted to "barbecue" themselves it was none of her business, suddenly realized that it might be a good time to take a long trip to Europe and the United States. This was the first phase. Next would be to get the Diems out of the country. Plans were made for them to attend an important meeting in Europe and they received formal invitations. A special plane was to fly them there. As their departure date approached, the CIA instructed its agents to work closer with the prospective new regimes. This hastened the disintegration of the Diems' elite guard. Then, for reasons that have never been clear, the Diems, having gone as far as the airport, turned, stepped back into their car, and sped to their palace. They must not have understood how the game worked. If they did not leave the country, they would be dead. They returned to an empty palace. All of their guard had fled. The actual killing was a simple thing - "for the good of the cause".

The United States and the CIA could wash their hands of it, for they had nothing to do with it. Like all assassinations; it just happened. In Washington the White House had tried to "save" the Diems, and by so doing, had preordained their deaths. This is the assassination scenario and it works in almost all cases, even when there is no elaborate plan. It would have seemed that the White House, and especially an old professional like Howard Hunt, would have known that it had happened that way and that changing the records would only have implicated them deeper than they already were by the summer of 1971. And now, in 1975, there has been a flood of charges about assassinations.

Of course the CIA has been involved. It made it its business to get close to the elite guards of a great many of the Third World countries. As long as these nation's leaders play the game, like King Hussein and the Shah of Iran, all goes well; but if one of them gets out of line, or if some cabal begins to grow in power and offer what might seem a better deal, then, as in the case of the Diems, the power of the United States will be withdrawn. Then, without doubt, the King is dead.

Most Americans are not aware of the frailty of Third world governments. Many have a military no larger and no more effective than a good-sized army band. Many have a "King's Guard" that is inadequate. The most trusted of the guard control the ammunition supplies; every time ammunition is issued for training, a close count is kept of expended rounds. Therefore no matter how wealthy the king may be, or how much wealth his country may possess in valuable raw materials, it will not assure his security. Rather, his money tends to threaten his life.

Thus these puny sovereigns must appeal to some greater power for their protection. For many years the United States, usually through the CIA, has provided the training for the elite guard. Without his guard, King Hussein of Jordan would have been dead or deposed long ago. His guard is trained by the CIA, even including paratrooper training by a clandestine military assistance program provided by the United States Air Force and the Army, though it is under CIA control. Similarly, many rulers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America owe their positions and in most cases their lives to the United States and the CIA, and most recently, to private corporations hired to train, and thereby control, the "elite guard".

This is how it begins; then comes the escalation. An elite guard is a small organization. As the ruler realizes his vulnerability, like the Diems and like the now deposed Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, he begins to look beyond the guard. He discusses an increase of his small and unskilled army with his "trainers" - the CIA. They are quick to say that he should have a larger army and that they can get him a military assistance program from the United States, provided he pledges undying loyalty. Now the program begins to pay off. A modest military assistance program of, say, fifty million dollars is begun. Of course, the entire amount is spent in the United States for American equipment. An old rule in the military assistance program is that whenever a piece of equipment is provided, ten times its cost will be spent for spare parts before it wears out. This is where the manufacturing companies make a real killing, for with spare parts they can charge whatever they want. The next escalation is as follows: if the ruler of one country has been given a fifty-million-dollar program, each of his neighbors asks for similar programs for self-defense. Since World War II this has been a trillion-dollar business.

Meanwhile, trade missions from the United States begin to work over the client states to see what natural resources can be acquired and for what price, while the CIA works with selected American manufacturers to portion out various franchises, such as Pepsi-Cola and Singer Sewing machines. Through this device other selected families in the client country are put on the road to becoming millionaires and powers in their own country. This creates power centers that at times are played off against each other, as the CIA sees fit. Eventually, the structure explodes, the elite guard weakens, and unless the ruler is a hard-headed pragmatist and leaves immediately, he will be assassinated.

Since World War II, there have been hundreds of "coups d'etats"- a euphemism for assassination. The list will grow as long as the United States does its diplomatic work clandestinely. Why else has Henry Kissinger "shuttled" from country to country in the Middle East? If his relationship with each of these countries is an undercover relationship, then he cannot meet with them publicly and in a group.

Eventually, practitioners of assassination by the removal of power reach the point where they see that technique as fit for the removal of opposition anywhere. That was why President Kennedy was killed. He was not murdered by some lone gunman or by some limited conspiracy, but by the breakdown of the protective system that should have made an assassination impossible. Once insiders know that he would not be protected, it was easy to pick the day and the place. In fact, those responsible for luring Kennedy to Dallas on November 23rd 1963 were not even in on the plan itself.

He went to Texas innocuously enough, to dedicate an Air Force hospital facility at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio. It was not too difficult then to get him to stop at Fort Worth - "to mend political fences". Of course, no good politician would go to Fort Worth and skip Dallas. All the conspirators had to do was to let the right "mechanics" know where Kennedy would be and when, and most importantly, that the usual precautions would not have been made and that escape would be facilitated.

This is the greatest single clue to that assassination. Who had the power to call off or drastically reduce the usual security precautions that always are in effect whenever a president travels?

Castro did not kill Kennedy, nor did the CIA. The power source that arranged that murder was on the inside. It had the means to reduce normal security and permit the choice of a hazardous route. It also has had the continuing power to cover up that crime for twelve years.

gchq · Posted: Wed Nov 10, 2004 9:43 am Post subject: IRAN "The Next Vietnam"

IRAN "The Next Vietnam"

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In what must have been the greatest gathering of royalty and near-royalty in the history of the world, hundreds of guests from Princess Grace of Monaco to Madame Onassis traveled to the ancient city of Persepolis in Iran to celebrate the crowning of the Shah as the true descendant and heir to the throne of Cyprus. In October 1971, the Empire of Cyprus celebrated its 2,500th year.

Reza Shah Pahlevi, the son of a one-time army General, not only wears this crown ceremoniously but, already surfeited with newly earned oil billions, he sees the new Iran as the fourth greatest nation on earth.

At the same time the former director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency sees Iran as the new Thailand, just as his predecessor, Gen. William "Wild Bill" Donovan made Thailand the base of clandestine American operations in Asia. Both men served nominally as ambassadors after having led the clandestine services of the U.S.

In the fragile balance that has become part of life in the Middle East, Reza Shah Pahlevi, who openly despises his Arab neighbors, is now the man of destiny.

Shortly after his royal guests left Persepolis, the proud Shah flexed his new found oil muscles, and "with London's prior agreement", took over three islands in the lower Persian Gulf - Abu Musa, Greater Tunbs, and Lesser Tunbs. The islands are strategically situated for the shipment of oil. Arabs from Libya to Iraq rose in protest over this rash act. Libya nationalized British oil interests and withdrew all its funds from British banks.

This was but a beginning. More recently, while Henry Kissinger was jetting from one capital to another in the Middle East, the Shah landed 1,500 of his U.S.-styled and U.S.-trained "special forces" in the sheikdom of Dhofar. The Shah claims that his troops were delivered in the U.S.-made C-130 transport aircraft and that they landed at the "invitation" of the Sultan of Oman. Although the Assistant Secretary of State for Middle Eastern Affairs, Joseph Sisco, has said recently that the government of neighboring Yemen is under a leadership that is "basically indigenous", the Shah believes that the "rebels" are supported by the U.S.S.R. and Communist China.

Few places in the world could be more remote and desolate than Salalah, the capital city of Dhofar. I have stopped there and have been amazed to find it a large, man-made oasis of luxurious vegetation, including plums, grapes, and bananas - all nurtured by an ancient irrigation system powered by blinded camels that drive a massive waterwheel device that brings water from a deep well. Salalah is where the British purchased aircraft landing rights with Maria Teresa silver dollars minted every year by the British with the same date, 1780, because that was the date of the originals that the then sheik possessed. Today this strange bit of green has become another outpost of the aggressive new Iran.

To the east and across the Gulf of Oman, the Shah is rushing to completion a huge new airport at the old landing ground of Jask, once the pioneering stop for BOAC and Air France. The old gravel field where we used to land the faithful DC3 and C47 transports of World War II is now being readied for the hottest jet fighters in the world, and for the very heavy C-135 Boeing, in-flight refueling tankers that will be added to the Shah's air force in the summer of 1974.

On another front, the Shah has placed his elite forces on the border Of Iraq, barely 100 miles east of Baghdad. Serious fighting has broken out in the area and neither side seems ready to give an inch. The passing years have seen other disputes between Arabs and Persians on the borders of the gulf at oil-rich Kuwait and on the strategic island of Bahrein just across the shallow waters from the greatest oil deposits in the entire Middle East - the ARAMCO concessions in the eastern territories of Saudi Arabia.

Only recently the age-old conflict between the Kurds and Iraq has broken out again into active fighting, and although the Shah would not want to be brought into any fight on his own long borders with the Kurds, whose lands lie between Iraq and Iran, some insiders believe that the Shah, with strong American assistance, may have made overtures to that wily old Eagle of the Mountains, the Kurdish General Mustafa al Barzani. It is known that the United States has made available to the Kurds a number of old but still combat-effective F-105 fighter bomber aircraft. Barzani's pilots are being trained in Iran and the F-105's will most likely operate and be maintained from Iranian airfields. In the heightening pressures of the coming Middle East war, this type of open "covert peacetime operation" says more about the nature of the Iranian-American relationship than anything else.

All of this would appear to be more of the same old "Arab problem" if it were not for several ominous incidents that signal the beginning of what seems destined to become another "Vietnam". In the Feb. 16th, 1974 issue of the Nation, Senator Abourezk said, "At the moment when peace seems possible in the Middle East, the United States appears to be helping to sow the seeds for future conflict." Commenting on developments in southern Arabia west of Oman, the Christian Science Monitor has called that action "a brewing mini-Vietnam". Already things have gone past the "brewing" stage, and past the point, when in a similar situation, John Kennedy became President and inherited fifteen years of clandestine developments in Indochina.

In what must be one of the most unusual and most ominous bits of big industry advertisements seen in many years, the Boeing Company inserted the following, in the January issue of Air Force magazine, the official voice of the Air Force Association and the unofficial but weighty voice of the U.S. Air Force: "MAINTAIN BOEING TANKERS IN IRAN. The Logistics Support Corporation {LSC), an affiliate of Boeing, is seeking qualified veterans or persons who are now separating from the military to service and maintain new 707 (C-135-acfdea) tankers in Iran. LSC is under contract to the Iranian Air Force to provide training for aerial tanker operations beginning in mid-1974. Assignment is for three or more years".

This advertisement means a lot more than it says. Years ago it was my job to provide cover for CIA units around the world. In many cases we used the name "Logistics Support Group", "Logistics Support Activity" etc. and, as in the well known Cuban Bay of Pigs affair, the agency established many of these cover units as commercial arrangements even when they were going to use "sheep-dipped" (covert administrative separation) military personnel. This would not be unusual in Iran, and there may well be such a clandestine arrangement with this Boeing "Logistics Support Corporation".

The CIA played the major role in over-throwing the government of Premier Mossadegh in 1953 and has been very powerful and influential in Iran ever since (note that the former Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, is now the Ambassador to Iran). The ClA's not-so-secret private cover airline, Air America, was instrumental in helping the Shah set up the Iranian National airline, Air Iran, and for many years - it may still do so - the CIA, through an affiliate of Air America, took care of maintenance for Air Iran.

Now that the Shah has 300 fighter bombers - 30 of them U.S.-built F-4's of an early type and 100 more on order of the most advanced model, he can use aerial refueling tankers to make it possible for him to deploy those first-line air-craft against any target in the Middle East.

Not only has the Shah built up a large air force, but he now has a fleet of 700 helicopters that includes 200 gun-ships, eighteen giant Chinooks, and eighteen antisubmarine warfare models.

700 helicopters require not less than 7,000 highly skilled maintenance personnel if they are to be used effectively in any kind of operational activity - training or combat. According to the testimony of an army expert extracted from the Congressional Record, it takes about twenty-four man-hours of maintenance for each hour of helicopter operations.

The point is that the Shah has an American Military Assistance Group of about 1,000 men, most of whom, it must be assumed, are performing administrative and training functions. This means that he must rely on outside, covert help for his logistics and operational support. And this type of support is usually provided by the CIA.

It is exactly this sort of morrass that got the United States involved so heavily in Vietnam before the Congress and the general public discovered what was going on. The movement of helicopters to South Vietnam from Laos by the CIA was the first step that led to the massive American involvement in Vietnam.

It is not the usual game of jockeying for position that we are witnessing in the Middle East. It is not Iraq, or the Kurds, or the Sultan of Oman, or the Sheikh or Yemen whom we are watching. Inevitably, in the words of Simon Head, in the March 21 issue of the New York Review of Books, the "fragile balance is not going to survive, it has been upset ... by the rising strength of two regional powers - Iran and Saudi Arabia. For both the source of this new strength is oil.". As in Southeast Asia a quarter-century ago the new Thailand, the new base of American involvement, is Iran. The new "Vietnam" will be that nation that breaks first and becomes "threatened by subversive insurgency". With the Shah tightening the noose around both Iraq and Saudi Arabia, it will be either one of them. Then Iran, with American aid, will dash in to save them from dreaded "Communism" and they will suffer the fate of a Vietnamese "liberation". And because all of this preparation is going ahead covertly, in secrecy and by deception, we may never know how we became involved until it is too late.

gchq · Posted: Thu Nov 11, 2004 9:17 am Post subject: INDONESIA 1958

INDONESIA 1958

Nixon, the CIA, and the Secret War

By L. Fletcher Prouty 1976

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"Blood ran in the streets. Villages were wiped out and a million people massacred in a battle for the riches and political control of Indonesia. Nixon and the CIA wanted Sukarno overthrown. But the creator of Indonesia knew how to fight".

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A letter from one of the most beautiful women in the world lies buried in a stack of mail on President Ford's desk. Written in Paris on July 24, 1975, by Dewi Sukarno, the former First Lady of Indonesia and widow of Dr. Achmed Sukarno, the charismatic Father of Indonesia, the letter is an appeal to President Ford for a complete explanation of the CIA-led and supported rebellions that took place in Indonesia in 1958, and 1965.

It is not well known in the United States that the 1958 rebellion led to a major Indonesian civil war. The CIA-inspired uprising in Indonesia, unlike the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, was a full-scale military operation.

The Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 was made by a thin brigade of about 1,500 Cuban exiles trained by theCIA in Guatemala. But the 1958 Indonesian action involved no less than 42,000 CIA-armed rebels supported by a fleet of bombers and vast numbers of four-engine transport aircraft as well as submarine assistance from the U.S. Navy.

It also involved a major training and logistical supporting effort on the part of the Philippines, Okinawa, Taiwan, and Singapore. But despite this massive armed force, the 1958 rebellion, like the Bay of Pigs invasion, was a total failure.

Sukarno's army drove the rebels on Sumatra and Celebes into the sea. There are some who might call the 1965 uprising a success. At least the rebels were not driven into the sea. However, for the United States it was a fantastically costly endeavor. The rebellion ended in the most massive and ruthless bloodbath since World War II.

While the headlines in the United States dealt with the slaughter in Vietnam, the press of the rest of the world heaped blame on the United States for the barbaric massacre in Indonesia. The victorious new government of General Suharto proceeded to assassinate nearly one million people. This terrible slaughter and the ensuing imprisonment of tens of thousands of Indonesian stirred Dewi Sukarno to seek President Ford's assistance in gaining the release of her countrymen from prison.

Dewi Sukarno has received no answer. But even without a reply she knows. The silence from Washington speaks for itself. A denial, if true, would have come without hesitation. The Indonesians know. The Latins had a phrase for it, is "feat cui prodest"- the perpetrator of a crime is he who profits by it. Today, major U.S. enterprises are plundering the raw material wealth of Indonesia - rubber, tin, and oil - in a manner that is more vile than what is happening in Chile. And there is no one to stop them.

Achmed Sukarno was one of those rare men who rose during the hours of crisis to unite one hundred million people and lead them out of the ashes of World War II. Sukarno came to liberate his country from the Japanese the Dutch, the Portuguese, and from all others who were ready to enslave his country once again.

He established his government on the "Five Pillars":

(I) belief in one supreme God

(2) just and civilized humanity

(3) unity of Indonesia

(4) democracy

(5) social justice.

Sukarno was forced to thread his way between communism and capitalism. His independence made him both friends and enemies. His worst enemies came from his polyglot people who are scattered over more than 3,000 islands. These islands make up the world's largest archipelago; they stretch along the equator for over 3,400 miles and are located in South-east Asia between the Philippines and Australia.

From one of these islands came Lt. Col. Alex Kawilarang, the military attaché serving in Washington who was to defect to the rebel forces and lead the rebel contingent on Sumatra, the Indonesian island richest in natural resources.

What is not generally known about the complex Indonesian struggle is the role that was played by the then vice-president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, and the bitter aftermath that involved the sudden ouster of Allen Dulles' protege, Frank Wisner, who at that time was the head of the clandestine arm of the CIA. After Watergate, when Anthony Lukas wrote about the growing mistrust between Nixon and the Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, in his book Nightmare, he could have added that since the 1958 Indonesian rebellion there were many in the CIA who made a career of hating Nixon because of what he had done to Frank Wisner, among others.

The Indonesian campaign began rather casually as so many CIA ventures do. Few if any ever originate at the top.

During an unguarded conversation in Washington the Indonesian military attaché mentioned earlier made it known to certain U.S. military acquaintances that there were many prominent and strong people in Indonesia who would be ready to rise against Sukarno if they were given a little support and encouragement from the United States. It happened that one of those U.S. military friends he talked to was not a military man at all, but a member of the CIA. The provocative words got back to Frank Wisner, then the Deputy Director of Plans. He was in charge of the CIA's clandestine activity and he authorized agents to follow up on that first conversation.

The Indonesian attache was wined and dined and encouraged to talk more. Reasons for the attaché's return to Indonesia on official business were successfully arranged. He was accompanied by CIA agents traveling under the cover of "U.S. military" personnel. During this visit they spoke with rebel leaders. They learned enough about the potential strength of this opposition to encourage the CIA to set in motion its biggest operation up to that date.

In the Philippines there was a strong nucleus of military men, chief among them a Colonel Valeriano, who had been President Magsaysay's military assistant. He had also worked on paramilitary exercises with the CIA during the Magsaysay campaign against the leftist rebel Huk movement.

This military group had gained considerable power during the Magsaysay tenure. Many of these special warfare experts from the Philippines had volunteered for duty in South Vietnam in 1955 when the CIA was deeply involved in providing under-cover support for the new and uncertain regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem .

By early 1958 these Filipinos and their CIA counterparts were prepared to involve the Philippines in the rebellion against Sukarno by setting up special warfare "Green Beret" training bases and by providing the Indonesian revolutionary council with clandestine air bases. One of those bases was on Palawan, the most western island of the Philippine archipelago, in the vicinity of the airfield at Puerto Princessa on Honda Bay. The other base was on the big southern island of Mindanao, near Davao Gulf.

Concurrently, in Washington, operations were being organized. Frank Wisner took over direct command of the of the everyday operations of the Indonesian project. A large staff under Desmond Fitzgerald of the Far East Division was set up. The most active element of this special staff came from the CIA's clandestine Air Division which at that time was under the control of Dick Helms.

As the plans expanded for this major undertaking. requirements for military equipment, people,aircraft, weapons, bases, submarines, and communications skyrocketed. In the Pentagon there are thousands of nondescript offices in which all sorts of tasks are done. One of these unobtrusive offices was an Air Force Division office. One day in 1958 two men from the CIA entered that office. After being identified they were permitted entrance to an interior office that was the "Focal Point" office for all U.S. Air Force Support of the clandestine operations of the CIA.

I had established that office in 1955 on orders from Gen. Thomas D. White, then Chief of Staff of the Air Force. This came about after several meetings with Allen W. Dulles, the Director of Central Intelligence, and others. When the CIA men entered that office in 1955, I was still in charge.

The agents outlined the Indonesian Plan, the Philippine support and training program, and told me about their own special operations staff that had been put together specifically for this requested light bombardment aircraft and long-range transport aircraft. We decided to take a number of twin engine B-26 aircraft out of mothball storage, put them through a retrofit line, and modify them so that they could be armed with a special 50-caliber machine gun package of eight guns, in the nose of the plane. This would give the B-26 more firepower than it ever had during the Korean War or World War II. The project was given top priority and covered in deep secrecy. Programs for pilot training and the recruitment of "mercenaries" were established.

Concurrent with our work, the CIA was putting together a "wartime" operational staff. Lt. Gen. Earl Barnes, who had been a senior air commander during World War II under Gen. Douglas MacArthur, was brought in to run all clandestine air activities.

At that time Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer was Commander in Chief of the Ryukyu Command on Okinawa. One David M. Shoup, the U.S. Marine Commander on Okinawa, asked if the Army could spare 14,000 rifles for a Marine requirement. Surprised at the Marine request for such a large order of guns, Lemnitzer acquiesced none the less and ordered the transfer of these weapons on the condition that they would be quickly replaced.

High on the ridge line of central Okinawa overlooking the city of Naha there was a modest size "Army" installation that hustled with considerable activity. This was the main CIA operational base in the Far East. It was under the direction of Ted Shannon, one of the Agency's most powerful agents. It was Shannon's office that had actually requested 42,000 rifles from General Shoup and since the order was so large Shoup had been unable to supply them, and had therefore borrowed 14,000 from the Army. On nearby Taiwan, the CIA had another large facility "Navy" base known as the Naval Auxiliary Communication Center (NACC). This "Comm. Center" controlled a large and very active air base a few miles south of Taiwan's capital, Taipei, and the huge Air America facilities near Taipei and the city of Tainan.

The B-26 bombers were ready to fly and a special ferrying arrangement was made with the Air Force to fly them across the Pacific to the Philippines and Menado. Rebel Indonesians, trained and equipped in the Philippines, were returned to Sumatra. Some were air-dropped and others landed on the beach from submarines that the U.S. Navy was operating, in support of the CIA, in the oceans south of Indonesia near the Christmas Islands. The war was on.

On Feb. 9, 1958, rebel Colonel Maluddin Simbolon issued an ultimatum in the name of a provincial government, the Central Sumatran Revolutionary Council, calling for the formation of a new central government. Sukarno refused and called upon his loyal army commander, General Abdul Haris Nasution, to destroy the rebel forces. By Feb. 21 loyal forces had been airlifted to Sumatra and had begun the attack. The rebel headquarters was in the southern coastal city of Padang. Rebel strongholds stretched all the way to Medan, near the northern end of the island and not far from Malaysia .

This was important administratively because by that time Frank Wisner, the CIA Deputy Director of Plans, had set up his forward headquarters in Singapore and at the direction of the 5412 Committee of the National Security Council, headed by Nixon. Wisner occupied that far away headquarters himself.

(It should be noted that in 1958 Allen Dulles was the head of the CIA, his brother John Foster Dulles was the Secretary of State. Eisenhower was President, and Nixon, as Vice President, chaired the clandestine affairs committee, then known as the "Special Group 5412/2". In other words nothing was done in Indonesia that was not directed by Nixon. If an action had not been directed by the NSC, then it was done unlawfully by the CIA.)

In 1958 Allen Dulles would have brought such a major operation to the attention of the Special Group and he would operate with its approval. This was an essential step in national policy because it then empowered the Department of Defense to provide the necessary support requested by the CIA. Much of this fell within the area of my responsibility at Air Force Headquarters, and I was kept informed on a regular basis of approved action and of Nixon's keen interest in this project.

The rebellion flared sporadically from one end of Indonesia to the other. While the CIA was supporting up to 100,000 rebels the State Department professed innocence. The U.S. ambassador, Howard P. Jones maintained that the United States had nothing to do with the rebellion and he protested the capture of the American oil properties. On the other hand, Sukarno had asked for more arms aid from the United States. He must have had strong suspicions about the source of rebel support. The vast number of guns, the bombers and heavy air transport aircraft dropping hundreds of tons of arms and equipment, as well as submarines supporting beach operations were just too sophisticated to be anything but major power ploy. Thus, his appeal for U.S. arms aid had the ring of gamesmanship.

Playing along with the game, John Foster Dulles issued a statement saying "that the United States would not provide arms to either side". And while he was publishing that falsehood, the United States furnished and piloted B-26 bombers, and these were bombing shipping in the Makassar Straits. Some had even flown as far south as the Java Sea. Almost immediately all insurance rates on shipping to and from Indonesia went on a wartime scale and costs became so prohibitive that most shipping actually ceased. The bombing attacks, kept so quiet in the United States that they hardly made the news, were being viewed with great alarm by the rest of the world.

What was "Top Secret" in Washington, was barroom gossip in the capitals of the world.

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His Excellency

President Gerald Ford

The White House

Washington, DC

Dear Mr. President,

As the widow of the late President Sukarno and being the only member of the family having overseas, I address myself to you, being deeply alarmed and disturbed by numerous and persistent reports in the international press. For instance, the CIA is said to have spied on my husband manufactured a fake film in order to slander the good name and honor of Sukarno, prepared an assassination attempt against him and conspired to oust him from power to estrange him from the Indonesian people by accusing him of collaborating with international communism in betrayal of Indonesian independence, which of course was totally absurd.

My husband has repeatedly informed me that he was fully aware of these immoral, illegal, subversive, anti-Indonesian activities against his beloved Indonesia his people, and against him personally.

I would like to request from you, as well as from the responsible Congressional Committees in the United States a full explanation of these reprehensible practices as carried out by an official United States Government Agency in the name of several American Presidents and Governments.

Both in 1958 and in 1965, the CIA directly interfered in the internal affairs of Indonesia In 1958, this monstrous action led to civil war. In 1965, it led to the ultimate takeover by a pro-American military regime, while hundreds of thousands of innocent peasants and loyal citizens were massacred in the name of this insane crusade against international communism. Still today, ten years later many tens of thousands of true patriots and Sukarnoists are locked up in jails and concentration camps being denied the simplest and most elementary human rights. American companies and aggressive foreign interests are indiscriminately plundering the natural riches of Indonesia to the advantage of the few and the disadvantage of the millions of unemployed and impoverished masses.

I must now ask you, Mr. President, in the name of freedom and justice, in the name of decency in relations between states and statesmen, between powerful nations and developing lands, in the name of the Indonesian people and the Sukarno family: did the United States of America commit these hideous crimes against Indonesia and against the founder of the nation? Will your government be prepared to accept responsibility for these evil practices? Over one hundred million Indonesians have been brainwashed, as was the rest of the world, by the present regime's propaganda to believe that the communism calmed out the insurrection. My countrymen, as well as everyone else, have the right to know the truth of the historic facts. It will be the painful duty for America now to reveal the CIA involvement in Indonesia and release all information and documents relevant to who really initiated the terrifying bloodbath that led to the overthrow of the legal Government and to the inhuman treatment in house arrest lasting three years until my husband's death.

In closing, I would like to strongly appeal to you, Mr. President, to use your Influence with the military regime in Jakarta, to immediately free those many thousands of political prisoners, men and women, former cabinet ministers, writers and journalists, who I know are entirely innocent of the crime of treason they have been accused of.

If the United States were to be instrumental in helping to improve the fate of so many thousands of courageous compatriots, I think the entire Indonesian nation would be grateful and Indonesians would regain their confidence in America's intentions towards the Third World. -

Respectfully.

R. S. Dewi Sukarno

July 24, 1975

Nobody · Posted: Fri Nov 12, 2004 3:28 am Post subject:

Makes the Gestapo and the SS look like a bunch of wannabes......
This has been going on for over 50 fcuking years for chrissakes........

qwpxz · Posted: Fri Nov 12, 2004 3:57 am Post subject:

"HOLY WAR" (NO SUCH THING) IS PLEDGED AGAINST AMERICA AS
LONG-PLANNED ILLUMINATI CONFLICT UNFOLDS.

Their agenda is clear - terrorism is good for business.
Terrorism pumps up everybody's budgets, especially defense, law enforcement,
interdiction, etc. As long as we can keep "foreign terrorism" alive,
everyone benefits -- the Department of Defense, the CIA, Department of State,
the National Security Agency and many others. They can all ask for more money
in their budgets by pointing to the "terrorists." We are in effect augmenting
that threat, making sure it stays alive and healthy, so that federal
agencies can be funded with ever-increasing amounts of money, especially
those agencies that do not have to account for the expenditures of those
monies.........I.E. The CIA......

The Next Casualty: Bill of Rights?

Absolutely. That is the Goal of this entire henious affair.

SO......don't buy into this utter nonsense about giving up
our Freedom's in order to be Free. It's CRAP!!!!!!!

War Without End

The global war against terror, news about the illegal invasion of Iraq, the corporate puppet presidents, the war criminal Tony Blair, September 11th 2001, the USS Liberty and New World Order crimes against humanity.

The Secret Team - The CIA and its allies in control.. - page 6