L. Fletcher Prouty - THE SECRET TEAM (Deep State)

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THE SECRET TEAM

The CIA
and Its Allies
in Control of the United
States and the World

L. FLETCHER PROUTY
Col., U.S. Air Force (Ret.)

Copyright © 1973, 1992, 1997 by L. Fletcher Prouty
All Rights Reserved

Collected Works CD cover

March 1997:

This 1997 edition of the book is available in its entirety on Len Osanic's rip-roaring 1997 CD-ROM, The Collected Works of Col. L. Fletcher Prouty along with ~600MB of 70+ articles, 100 images, 30 topics and 6 hours of audio material. Read all about it and how to order your own copy by going to: www.prouty.org

Here on ratical we will be hooking up the rest of the book in HTML and ASCII formats over the next 7 months. Each month will see the following chapters come online:

May: Chapters 3-6
June: Chapters 7-10
July: Chapters 11-15
August: Chapters 16-19
September: Chapters 20-23
October: Appendices I-III

The online copy of this book was made possible by the efforts and generosity of Len Osanic. We thank him for his support. Be sure to check out the details on the complete CD if you are interested in this book. There is a great deal to recommend it for anyone who wants to study the writings, interviews and perceptions of Colonel Prouty. The significance of Prouty's level and depth of first-hand experience of World War II and direct participation in the ensuing birth and rise of the National Security State is provided in great detail on The Collected Works CD.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Author's Note

Preface

Preface to the Second Edition

Preface: "THE SECRET TEAM II" 1997

PART I THE SECRET TEAM

Chapter 1 The "Secret Team" -- the Real Power Structure

Chapter 2 The Nature of Secret Team Activity: A Cuban Case Study

PART II THE CIA: HOW IT RUNS

Chapter 3 An Overview of the CIA

Section I. Intelligence versus Secret Operations

Section II. Origins of the Agency and
the Seeds of Secret Operations

Section III. A Simple Coup d'État to a Global Mechanism

Chapter 4 From the Word of the Law to the Interpretation:
President Kennedy Attempts to Put the CIA Under Control

Chapter 5 "Defense" as a National Military Philosophy,
the Natural Prey of the Intelligence Community

Chapter 6 "It Shall Be the Duty of the Agency: To Advise, to Coordinate,
to Correlate and Evaluate and Disseminate
and to Perform Services of Common Concern . . ."

Coordination of Intelligence -- the
Major Assigned Role of the CIA

Correlation, Evaluation and Dissemination of
Intelligence: Heart of the Profession

Services of Common Concern: An Attempt at Efficiency

Chapter 7 From the Pines of Maine to the Birches of Russia:
The Nature of Clandestine Operations

Chapter 8 CIA: "The Cover Story" Intelligence Agency
and the Real-Life Clandestine Operator

Chapter 9 The Coincidence of Crises

Chapter 10 The Dulles-Jackson-Correa Report in Action

PART III THE CIA: HOW IT IS ORGANIZED

Chapter 11 The Dulles Era Begins

Chapter 12 Personnel: The Chameleon Game

Chapter 13 Communications: The Web of the World

Chapter 14 Transportation: Anywhere in the World -- Now

Chapter 15 Logistics by Miracle

PART IV THE CIA: SOME EXAMPLES
THROUGHOUT THE WORLD

Chapter 16 Cold War: The Pyrrhic Gambit

Chapter 17 Mission Astray, Soviet Gamesmanship

Chapter 18 Defense, Containment, and Anti-Communism

Chapter 19 The New Doctrine: Special Forces and
the Penetration of the Mutual Security Program

Chapter 20 Khrushchev's Challenge: The U-2 Dilemma

Chapter 21 A Time of Covert Action: U-2 to Kennedy Inaugural

Chapter 22 Camelot: From the Bay of Pigs to Dallas, Texas

Chapter 23 Five Presidents: "Nightmares We Inherited"

APPENDICES:

I. Definition of Special Operations

II. Powers and Duties of the CIA

III. Training Under the Mutual Security Program

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

The "Secret Team" --
The Real Power Structure

The most remarkable development in the management of America's relations with other countries during the quarter-century since the end of World War II has been the assumption of more and more control over military, financial and diplomatic operations at home and abroad by men whose activities are secret, whose budget is secret, whose very identities as often as not are secret -- in short, by a Secret Team whose actions only those implicated in them are in a position to monitor and to understand.

For the purposes of this historical study, the choice of the word "Team" is most significant. It is well known that the members of a team, as in baseball or football, are skilled professionals under the direct control of someone higher up. They do not create their own game plan. They work for their coach and their owner. There is always some group that manages them and "calls the plays". Team members are like lawyers and agents, they work for someone. They generally do not plan their work. They do what their client tells them to do. For example: this is true of agents in the Central Intelligence Agency. It is an "Agency" and not a "Department" and its employees are highly skilled professionals who perform the functions their craft demands of them. Thus, the members of the highest level "Secret Team" work for their masters despite the fact that their own high office may make it appear to others that they, themselves are not only the Team but the Power Elite. This recalls a story related by the Rt. Hon. Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls, of Great Britain, during WW II.

Winston Churchill had left the Admiralty to become Prime Minister. Frequently he would come down to the Admiralty basement on his way from #10 Downing Street, to his underground, bomb-proof bedroom. He made it his practice to visit the Officer in Charge for up-to-date Intelligence and then stroll into the Duty Captain's room where there was a small bar from which he sometimes indulged in a night-cap, along with his ever-present cigar.

On this particular night there had been a heavy raid on Rotterdam. He sat there, meditating, and then, as if to himself, he said, "Unrestricted submarine warfare, unrestricted air bombing -- this is total war." He continued sitting there, gazing at a large map, and then said, "Time and the Ocean and some guiding star and High Cabal have made us what we are."

This was a most memorable scene and a revelation of reality that is infrequent, at best. If for the great Winston Churchill, there is a "High Cabal" that has made us what we are, our definition is complete. Who could know better than Churchill himself during the darkest days of World War II, that there exists, beyond doubt, an international High Cabal? This was true then. It is true today, especially in these times of the One World Order. This all-powerful group has remained superior because it had learned the value of anonymity. For them, the Secret Team and its professionals operate.

We may wish to note that in a book "Gentleman Spy, the Life of Allen Dulles" the author, Peter Grose cites Allen Dulles response to an invitation to the luncheon table from Hoover's Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson. Allen Dulles assured his partners in the Sullivan & Cromwell law firm, "Let it be known quietly that I am a lawyer and not a diplomat." He could not have made a more characteristic and truthful statement about himself. He always made it clear that he did not "plan" his work, he was always the "lawyer" who carried out the orders of his client whether the President of the United States, or the President of the local bank.

The Secret Team (ST) being described herein consists of security-cleared individuals in and out of government who receive secret intelligence data gathered by the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) and who react to those data, when it seems appropriate to them, with paramilitary plans and activities, e.g. training and "advising" -- a not exactly impenetrable euphemism for such things as leading into battle and actual combat -- Laotian tribal troops, Tibetan rebel horsemen, or Jordanian elite Palace Guards.

Membership on the Team, granted on a "need-to-know" basis, varies with the nature and location of the problems that come to its attention, and its origins derive from that sometimes elite band of men who served with the World War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS) under the father of them all, General "Wild Bill" William J. Donovan, and in the old CIA.

The power of the Team derives from its vast intragovernmental undercover infrastructure and its direct relationship with great private industries, mutual funds and investment houses, universities, and the news media, including foreign and domestic publishing houses. The Secret Team has very close affiliations with elements of power in more than three-score foreign countries and is able when it chooses to topple governments, to create governments, and to influence governments almost anywhere in the world.

Whether or not the Secret Team had anything whatsoever to do with the deaths of Rafael Trujillo, Ngo Dinh Diem, Ngo Dinh Nhu, Dag Hammerskjold, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and others may never be revealed, but what is known is that the power of the Team is enhanced by the "cult of the gun" and by its sometimes brutal and always arbitrary anti-Communist flag waving, even when real Communism had nothing to do with the matter at hand.

The Secret Team does not like criticism, investigation, or history and is always prone to see the world as divided into but two camps -- "Them" and "Us". Sometimes the distinction may be as little as one dot, as in "So. Viets" and "Soviets," the So. Viets being our friends in Indochina, and the Soviets being the enemy of that period. To be a member, you don't question, you don't ask; it's "Get on the Team" or else. One of its most powerful weapons in the most political and powerful capitals of the world is that of exclusion. To be denied the "need to know" status, like being a member of the Team, even though one may have all the necessary clearances, is to be totally blackballed and eliminated from further participation. Politically, if you are cut from the Team and from its insider's knowledge, you are dead. In many ways and by many criteria the Secret Team is the inner sanctum of a new religious order.

At the heart of the Team, of course, are a handful of top executives of the CIA and of the National Security Council (NSC), most notably the chief White House adviser to the President on foreign policy affairs. Around them revolves a sort of inner ring of Presidential officials, civilians, and military men from the Pentagon, and career professionals of the intelligence community. It is often quite difficult to tell exactly who many of these men really are, because some may wear a uniform and the rank of general and really be with the CIA and others may be as inconspicuous as the executive assistant to some Cabinet officer's chief deputy. Out beyond this ring is an extensive and intricate network of government officials with responsibility for, or expertise in, some specific field that touches on national security or foreign affairs: "Think Tank" analysts, businessmen who travel a lot or whose businesses (e.g. import-export or cargo airline operations) are useful, academic experts in this or that technical subject or geographic region, and quite importantly, alumni of the intelligence community -- a service from which there are no unconditional resignations. All true members of the Team remain in the power center whether in office with the incumbent administration or out of office with the hard-core set. They simply rotate to and from official jobs and the business world or the pleasant haven of academe.

Thus, the Secret Team is not a clandestine super-planning-board or super-general-staff. But even more damaging to the coherent conduct of foreign and military affairs, it is a bewildering collection of semi-permanent or temporarily assembled action committees and networks that respond pretty much ad hoc to specific troubles and to flash-intelligence data inputs from various parts of the world, sometimes in ways that duplicate the activities of regular American missions, sometimes in ways that undermine those activities, and very often in ways that interfere with and muddle them. At no time did the powerful and deft hand of the Secret Team evidence more catalytic influence than in the events of those final ninety days of 1963, which the "Pentagon Papers" were supposed to have exposed.