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

PREFACE 1972

From President to Ambassador, Cabinet Officer to Commanding General, and from Senator to executive assistant—all these men have their sources of information and guidance. Most of this information and guidance is the result of carefully laid schemes and ploys of pressure groups. In this influential coterie one of the most interesting and effective roles is that played by the behind the scenes, faceless, nameless, ubiquitous briefing officer.

He is the man who sees the President, the Secretary, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff almost daily, and who carries with him the most skillfully detailed information. He is trained by years of experience in the precise way to present that information to assure its effectiveness. He comes away day after day knowing more and more about the man he has been briefing and about what it is that the truly influential pressure groups at the center of power and authority are really trying to tell these key decision makers. In Washington, where such decisions shape and shake the world, the role of the regular briefing officer is critical.

Leaders of government and of the great power centers regularly leak information of all kinds to columnists, television and radio commentators, and to other media masters with the hope that the material will surface and thus influence the President, the Secretary, the Congress, and the public. Those other inside pressure groups with their own briefing officers have direct access to the top men; they do not have to rely upon the media, although they make great use of it. They are safe and assured in the knowledge that they can get to the decision maker directly. They need no middleman other than the briefing officer. Such departments as Defense, State, and the CIA use this technique most effectively.

For nine consecutive, long years during those crucial days from 1955 through January 1, 1964, I was one of those briefing officers. I had the unique assignment of being the Focal Point officer for contacts between the CIA and the Department of Defense on matters pertaining to the military support of the Special Operations² of that Agency. In that capacity I worked with Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles, several Secretaries of Defense, and Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as many others in key governmental places. My work took me to more than sixty countries and to CIA offices and covert activities all over the world—from such hot spots as Saigon and to such remote places as the South Pole. Yes, there have been secret operations in Antarctica.

It was my job not only to brief these men, but to brief them from the point of view of the CIA so that I might win approval of the projects presented and of the accompanying requests for support from the military in terms of money, manpower, facilities, and materials. I was, during this time, perhaps the best informed Focal Point officer among the few who operated in this very special area. The role of the briefing officer is quiet, effective, and most influential; and, in the CIA, specialized in the high art of top level indoctrination.

It cannot be expected that a John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, a Richard Nixon, or a following President will have experienced and learned all the things that may arise to confront him during his busy official life in the White House. It cannot be expected that a Robert McNamara or a Melvin Laird, a Dean Rusk or a William Rogers, etc. comes fully equipped to high office, aware of all matters pertaining to what they will encounter in their relationship with the Congo or Cuba, Vietnam or Pakistan, and China or Russia and the emerging new nations. These men learn about these places and the many things that face them from day to day from an endless and unceasing procession of briefing officers.

Henry Kissinger was a briefing officer. General John Vogt was one of the best. Desmond Fitzgerald, Tracy Barnes, Ed Lansdale, and Brute Krulak, in their own specialties, were top-flight briefing officers on subjects that until the publication of the Pentagon Papers, few people had ever seen in print or had ever even contemplated.

(You can imagine my surprise when I read the June 13, 1971, issue of the Sunday New York Times and saw there among the Pentagon Papers a number of basic information papers that had been in my own files in the Joint Chiefs of Staff area of the Pentagon. Most of the papers of that period had been source documents from which I had prepared dozens—even hundreds—of briefings, for all kinds of projects, to be given to top Pentagon officers. Not only had many of those papers been in my files, but I had either written many of them myself or had written certain of the source documents used by the men who did.)

The briefing officer, with the staff officer, writes the basic papers. He researches the papers. He has been selected because he has the required knowledge and experience. He has been to the countries and to the places involved. He may know the principals in the case well. He is supposed to be the best man available for that special job. In my own case, I had been on many special assignments dating back to the Cairo and Tehran conferences of late 1943 that first brought together the Big Four of the Allied nations of WW II: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek and Joseph Stalin.

The briefing officer reads all of the messages, regardless of classification. He talks to a number of other highly qualified men. He may even have staff specialists spread out all over the world upon whom he may call at any time for information. Working in support of the Focal Point office, which I headed, there were hundreds of experts and agents concealed in military commands throughout the world who were part of a network I had been directed to establish in 1955–1956 as a stipulation of National Security Council directive 5412, March 1954.

In government official writing, the man who really writes the paper—or more properly, the men whose original work and words are put together to become the final paper—are rarely, if ever, the men whose names appear on that paper. A paper attributed to Maxwell Taylor, Robert McNamara or Dean Rusk, of the Kennedy era, would not, in almost all instances, have been written by them; but more than likely would have been assembled from information gathered from the Departments of Defense and State and from CIA sources and put into final language by such a man as General Victor H. Krulak, who was among the best of that breed of official writers.

From 1955 through 1963, if some official wanted a briefing on a highly classified subject involving the CIA, I would be one of those called upon to prepare the material and to make the briefing. At the same time, if the CIA wanted support from the Air Force for some covert operation, I was the officer who had been officially designated to provide this special operational support to the CIA.

If I was contacted by the CIA to provide support for an operation which I believed the Secretary of Defense had not been previously informed of, I would see to it that he got the necessary briefing from the CIA or from my office and that any other Chief of Staff who might be involved would get a similar briefing. In this unusual business I found rather frequently that the CIA would be well on its way into some operation that would later require military support before the Secretary and the Chiefs had been informed.

During preparations for one of the most important of these operations, covered in some detail in this book, I recall briefing the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, on the subject of the largest clandestine special operation that the CIA had ever mounted up to that time: and then hearing him say to the other Chiefs, I just can’t believe it. I never knew that.

Here was the nation’s highest ranking military officer, the man who would be held responsible for the operation should it fail or become compromised, and he had not been told enough about it to know just how it was being handled. Such is the nature of the game as played by the Secret Team.

I have written for several magazines on this subject, among them the Armed Forces Journal, The New Republic, the Empire Magazine of the Denver Sunday Post, and The Washington Monthly. It was for this latter publication that I wrote The Secret Team, an article that appeared in the May 1970 issue and that led to the development of this book.

With the publication of the Pentagon Papers on June 13, 1971, interest in this subject area was heightened and served to underscore my conviction that the scope of that article must be broadened into a book.

Within days of The New York Times publication of those Pentagon Papers, certain editorial personnel with the BBC-TV program, Twenty-Four Hours, recalling my Secret Team article, invited me to appear on a series on TV with, among others, Daniel Ellsberg. They felt that my experience with the Secret Team would provide material for an excellent companion piece to the newly released Pentagon Papers, which were to be the primary topic of the discussions. I flew to London and made a number of programs for BBC-TV and Radio. Legal problems and the possible consequences of his departure from the country at that time precluded the simultaneous appearance of Daniel Ellsberg. The programs got wide reception and served to underscore how important the subject of the Pentagon Papers is throughout the world.

I have not chosen to reveal and to expose unreleased classified documents; but I do believe that those that have been revealed, both in the Pentagon Papers and elsewhere, need to be interpreted and fully explained. I am interested in setting forth and explaining what secrecy and the cult of containment really mean and what they have done to our way of life and to our country. Furthermore, I want to correct any disinformation that may have been given by those who have tried to write on these subjects in other related histories.

I have lived this type of work; I know what happened and how it happened. I have known countless men who participated in one way or another in these unusual events of Twentieth Century history. Many of these men have been and still are members of the Secret Team. It also explains why much of it has been pure propaganda and close to nationwide brainwashing of the American public. I intend to interpret and clarify these events by analyzing information already in the public domain. There is plenty.

Few concepts during this half century have been as important, as controversial, as misunderstood, and as misinterpreted as secrecy in Government. No idea during this period has had a greater impact upon Americans and upon the American way of life than that of the containment of Communism. Both are inseparably intertwined and have nurtured each other in a blind Pavlovian way. Understanding their relationship is a matter of fundamental importance.

Much has been written on these subjects and on their vast supporting infrastructure, generally known as the intelligence community. Some of this historical writing has suffered from a serious lack of inside knowledge and experience. Most of this writing has been done by men who know something about the subject, by men who have researched and learned something about the subject, and in a few cases by men who had some experience with the subject. Rarely is there enough factual experience on the part of the writer. On the other hand, the Government and other special interests have paid writers huge amounts to write about this subject as they want it done, not truthfully. Thus our history is seriously warped and biased by such work.

Many people have been so concerned about what has been happening to our Government that they have dedicated themselves to investigating and exposing its evils. Unfortunately, a number of these writers have been dupes of those cleverer than they or with sinister reasons for concealing knowledge. They have written what they thought was the truth, only to find out (if they ever did find out) that they had been fed a lot of contrived cover stories and just plain hogwash. In this book I have taken extracts from some of this writing and, line by line, have shown how it has been manipulated to give a semblance of truth while at the same time being contrived and false.

Nevertheless, there have been some excellent books in this broad area. But many of these books suffer from various effects of the dread disease of secrecy and from its equally severe corollary illness called cover (the CIA’s official euphemism for not telling the truth).

The man who has not lived in the secrecy and intelligence environment—really lived in it and fully experienced it—cannot write accurately about it. There is no substitute for the day to day living of a life in which he tells his best friends and acquaintances, his family and his everyday contacts one story while he lives another. The man who must depend upon research and investigation inevitably falls victim to the many pitfalls of the secret world and of the cover story world with its lies and counter-lies.

A good example of this is the work of Les Gelb and his Pentagon associates on the official version of the purloined Pentagon Papers. That very title is the biggest cover story (no pun intended) of them all; so very few of those papers were really of Pentagon origin. The fact that I had many of them in my office of Special Operations in Joint Staff area, and that most of them had been in the files of the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs did not validate the locale of their origin. They were working copies and not originals. Notice how few were signed by true military officers.

It is significant to note that the historical record that has been called the Pentagon Papers was actually a formal government-funded study of the history of United States involvement in Vietnam from World War II to the present i.e. 1945 to 1968. On June 17, 1967 the Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara directed that work. A task force consisting of six times six professionals under the direction of Leslie H. Gelb produced 37 studies and 15 collections of documents in 43 volumes that were presented on January 15, 1969 to the then-Secretary of Defense, Clark M. Clifford by Mr. Gelb with the words from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick:

This is a world of chance, free will, and necessity, all interweavingly working together as one: chance by turn rules either and had the last featuring blow at events.

As you may recall, this treasure trove of TOP SECRET papers was delivered to The New York Times, and other newspapers in mid-June, 1971, by a then-unknown Hippie of that period. His name was Daniel Ellsberg. What few people have learned since that time is the fact that both Daniel Ellsberg, who pirated these highly classified papers, and Leslie Gelb the Director of that Task Force, had worked in that same office of International Security Affairs (ISA).

The misappropriation of those documents was not the work of some true patriots as Noam Chomsky wrote in 1972. Rather it was an inside job. That ISA office had been the home of many of the big names of the Vietnam War period, among them Paul H. Nitze, John T. McNaughton, Paul C. Warnke and William Bundy, among others. The fact that I had many of them in my office, that I had worked with them, and that I had written parts of some of them proves that they were not genuine Pentagon papers, because my work at that time was devoted to support of the CIA. The same is true of General Krulak, William Bundy, and to a degree, Maxwell Taylor among others.

To look at this matter in another way, the man who has lived and experienced this unnatural existence becomes even more a victim of its unreality. He becomes enmeshed beyond all control upon the horns of a cruel dilemma. On the one hand, his whole working life has been dedicated to the cause of secrecy and to its protection by means of cover stories (lies). In this pursuit he has given of himself time after time to pledges, briefings, oaths, and deep personal conviction regarding the significance of that work. Even if he would talk and write, his life has been so interwoven into the fabric of the real and the unreal, the actual and the cover story, that he would be least likely to present the absolutely correct data.

On the other hand, as a professional he would have been subjected to such cellularization and compartmentalization each time he became involved in any real deep operation that he would not have known the whole story anyhow. This compartmentalization is very real. I have worked on projects with many CIA men so unaware of the entire operation that they had no realization and awareness of the roles of other CIA men working on the same project.

I would know of this because inevitably somewhere along the line both groups would come to the Department of Defense for hardware support. I actually designed a special office in the Pentagon with but one door off the corridor. Inside, it had a single room with one secretary. However, off her office there was one more door that led to two more offices with a third doorway leading to yet another office, which was concealed by the door from the secretary’s room. I had to do this because at times we had CIA groups with us who were now allowed to meet each other, and who most certainly would not have been there had they known that the others were there. (For the record, the office was 4D1000—it may have been changed by now; but it had remained that way for many years.)

Another group of writers, about the world of secrecy, are the masters—men like Allen W. Dulles, Lyman Kirkpatrick, Peer de Silva and Chester Cooper. My own choice of the best of these are Peer de Silva and Lyman Kirkpatrick. These are thoroughly professional intelligence officers who have chosen a career of high-level intelligence operations. Their writing is correct and informative—to a degree beyond that which most readers will be able to translate and comprehend at first reading; yet they are properly circumspect and guarded and very cleverly protective of their profession.

There is another category of writer and self-proclaimed authority on the subjects of secrecy, intelligence, and containment. This man is the suave, professional parasite who gains a reputation as a real reporter by disseminating the scraps and Golden Apples thrown to him by the great men who use him. This writer seldom knows and rarely cares that many of the scraps from which he draws his material have been planted, that they are controlled leaks, and that he is being used, and glorified as he is being used, by the inside secret intelligence community.

Allen Dulles had a penchant for cultivating a number of such writers with big names and inviting them to his table for a medieval style luncheon in that great room across the hall from his own offices in the old CIA headquarters on the hill overlooking Foggy Bottom. Here, he would discuss openly and all too freely the same subjects that only hours before had been carefully discussed in the secret inner chambers of the operational side of that quiet Agency. In the hands of Allen Dulles, secrecy was simply a chameleon device to be used as he saw fit and to be applied to lesser men according to his schemes. It is quite fantastic to find people like Daniel Ellsberg being charged with leaking official secrets simply because the label on the piece of paper said TOP SECRET, when the substance of many of the words written on those same papers was patently untrue and no more than a cover story. Except for the fact that they were official "lies," these papers had no basis in fact, and therefore no basis to be graded TOP SECRET or any other degree of classification. Allen Dulles would tell similar cover stories to his coterie of writers, and not long thereafter they would appear in print in some of the most prestigious papers and magazines in the country, totally unclassified, and of course, cleverly untrue.

Lastly there is the writer from outside this country who has gained his inside information from sources in another country. These sources are no doubt reliable; they know exactly what has taken place—as in Guatemala during the Bay of Pigs era—and they can speak with some freedom. In other cases, the best of these sources have been from behind the Iron Curtain.

In every case, the chance for complete information is very small, and the hope that in time researchers, students, and historians will be able to ferret out truth from untruth, real from unreal, and story from cover story is at best a very slim one. Certainly, history teaches us that one truth will add to and enhance another; but let us not forget that one lie added to another lie will demolish everything. This is the important point.

Consider the past half century. How many major events—really major events—have there been that simply do not ring true? How many times has the entire world been shaken by alarms of major significance, only to find that the events either did not happen at all, or if they did, that they had happened in a manner quite unlike the original story? The war in Vietnam is undoubtedly the best example of this. Why is it that after more than thirty years of clandestine and overt involvement in Indochina, no one had been able to make a logical case for what we had been doing there and to explain adequately why we had become involved; and what our real and valid objectives in that part of the world were?

The mystery behind all of this lies in the area we know as Clandestine activity,intelligence operations,secrecy, and cover stories, used on a national and international scale. It is the object of this book to bring reality and understanding into this vast unknown area.

L. FLETCHER PROUTY

Colonel, U.S. Air Force (Ret’d)

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

Like it or not, we now live in a new age of One World. This is the age of global companies, of global communications and transport, of global food supply and finance and . . . just around the corner . . . global accommodation of political systems. In this sense, there are no home markets, no isolated markets and no markets outside the global network. It is time to face the fact that true national sovereignty no longer exists. We live in a world of big business, big lawyers, big bankers, even bigger moneymen and big politicians. It is the world of The Secret Team.

In such a world, the Secret Team is a dominant power. It is neither military nor police. It is covert, and the best (or worst) of both. It gets the job done whether it has political authorization and direction, or not. It is independent. It is lawless.

This book is about the real CIA and its allies around the world. It is based upon personal experience generally derived from work in the Pentagon from 1955 to 1964. At retirement, I was Chief of Special Operations (clandestine activities) with the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. These duties involved the military support of the clandestine activities of the CIA and were performed under the provisions of National Security Council Directive No. 5412/2.

Since this book was first published in 1973, we have witnessed the unauthorized release of the Pentagon Papers, Watergate and the resignation of President Nixon, the run-away activities of the Vietnam War, the Arab Oil Embargo that led to the greatest financial heist in history, and the blatantly unlawful Iran-Contra affair. All of these were brought about and master-minded by a renegade Secret Team that operated secretly, without Presidential direction; without National Security Council approval—so they say; and, generally, without Congressional knowledge. This trend increases. Its scope expands . . . even today.

I was the first author to point out that the CIA’s most important Cover Story is that of an Intelligence agency. Of course the CIA does make use of intelligence and intelligence gathering, but that is largely a front for its primary interest, Fun and Games. The CIA is the center of a vast mechanism that specializes in Covert Operations . . . or as Allen Dulles used to call it, Peacetime Operations. In this sense, the CIA is the willing tool of a higher level Secret Team, or High Cabal, that usually includes representatives of the CIA and other instrumentalities of the government, certain cells of the business and professional world and, almost always, foreign participation. It is this Secret Team, its allies, and its method of operation that are the principal subjects of this book.

It must be made clear that at the heart of Covert Operations is the denial by the operator, i.e. the U.S. Government, of the existence of national sovereignty. The Covert operator can, and does, make the world his playground . . . including the U.S.A.

Today, early 1990, the most important events of this century are taking place with the ending of the Cold War era, and the beginning of the new age of One World under the control of businessmen and their lawyers, rather than the threat of military power. This scenario for change has been brought about by a series of Secret Team operations skillfully orchestrated while the contrived hostilities of the Cold War were at their zenith.

Chief among these, yet quite unnoticed, President Nixon and his Secretary of the Treasury, George Schultz, established a Russian/ American organization called the USA-USSR Trade and Economic Council, in 1972. Its objective was to bring about a union of the Fortune 500 Chief Executive Officers of this country, among others, such as the hierarchy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with their counterparts in the Soviet Union. This important relationship, sponsored by David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank and his associates, continued through the Carter years. The bilateral activity increased significantly during the Reagan/Shultz years of the Eighties despite such Evil Empire tantrums as the Korean Airlines Boeing 747 Flight 007 shootdown in 1983.

It is this US-TEC organization, with its counterpart bilateral agreements among other nations and the USSR, that has brought about the massive Communist world changes.

The Cold War has been the most expensive war in history. R. Buckminster Fuller has written in Grunch of Giants:

We can very properly call World War I the million dollar war and World War II the billion dollar war and World War III (Cold War) the trillion dollar war.

The power structure that kept the Cold War at that level of intensity has been driven by the Secret Team and its multinational covert operations, to wit:

This is the fundamental game of the Secret Team. They have this power because they control secrecy and secret intelligence and because they have the ability to take advantage of the most modern communications system in the world, of global transportation systems, of quantities of weapons of all kinds, of a world-wide U.S. military supporting base structure. They can use the finest intelligence system in the world, and most importantly, they are able to operate under the canopy of an ever-present enemy called Communism. And then, to top all of this, there is the fact that the CIA has assumed the right to generate and direct secret operations.

—L. Fletcher Prouty

Alexandria, VA, 1990

PREFACE: THE SECRET TEAM II 1997

Like it or not, we now live in the age of One World. This is the age of global companies, of global communications and transport, of global food supply and finance and . . . just around the corner . . . global accommodation of political systems. In this sense, there are no home markets, no isolated markets and no markets outside the global network.

It is time to face the fact that true national sovereignty no longer exists. We live in a world of big business, big lawyers, big bankers, even bigger money-men and big politicians. It is the world of The Secret Team and its masters. We are now, despite common mythology to the contrary, the most dependent society that has ever lived, and the future of the viability of that infrastructure of that society is unpredictable. It is crumbling.

As one of the greatest historians of all time, Ibn Khaldun, wrote in his unequaled historical work The Muqaddimah of the 14th Century:

God created and fashioned man in a form that can live and subsist only with the help of food. . . . Through cooperation, the needs of a number of persons, many times greater than their own number, can be satisfied.

As this One World infrastructure emerges it increases the percentage of our total dependence upon remote food production capacity to the mass production capability and transport means of enormous companies operating under the global policy guidance of such organizations as the Chartered Institute of Transport in London, and the international banking community. As individuals, few of us would have any idea where to get a loaf of bread or yard of fabric other than in some supermarket and department store . . . and we are all dependent upon some form of efficient transport, electric power, gasoline at the pump, and boundless manufacturing capacity and versatility. Let that system collapse, at any point, and all of us will be helpless. A cooperating, working system is essential to survival; yet over-all it is a system without leadership and guidance.

At the same time the traditional family farm, and even community farms and industries, have all but vanished from the scene. This has created, at least in what we label, the advanced nations, a dearth of farmers and of people who have that basic experience along with that required in the food and home products industries. Furthermore, as this trend is amplified, the transport of farm produce has become increasingly assigned to the trucking industry, which has its overland limits . . . mostly as applied to the tonnage limits of rural bridges, and the economical availability of petroleum.

As a result, something as simple as a trucking industry strike that keeps trucks out of any city for seventy-two hours or more, will lead to starvation and food riots. None of us know where to get food, if it is not in the nearby supermarket; and if we do have a stored supply of food locked in the cellar, we shall simply be the targets of those who do not. Food is the ultimate driving force. Under such predictable conditions, there will be waves of slaughter and eventually cannibalism. Man must eat, and the only way he can obtain adequate food supplies is through cooperation and the means to transport and distribute food and other basic necessities. This essential role is being diminished beyond the borderline. The lack of food supplies has already resulted in a form of covert genocide in many countries. Other essential shortages unavoidably follow.

As Rudyard Kipling has said: Transport is Civilization. The opposite is equally true, Without reliable transport we are reduced to the state of barbarism.

These are fundamental statements of fact. In such a world, the Secret Team is the functional element of the dominant power. It is the point of the spear and is neither military nor police. It is covert: and the best (or worst) of both. It gets the job done whether it has political authorization and direction, or not. In this capacity, it acts independently. It is lawless. It operates everywhere with the best of all supporting facilities from special weaponry and advanced communications, with the assurance that its members will never be prosecuted. It is subservient to the Power Elite and protected by them. The Power Elite or High Cabal need not be Royalty in these days. They are their equals or better.

Note with care, it is labeled a Team. This is because as with any highly professional team it has its managers, its front office and its owners. These are the Power Elite to whom it is beholden. They are always anonymous, and their network is ancient and world-wide. Let us draw an example from recent history.

During the Senate Hearings of 1975 on Alleged Assassination Ploys Involving Foreign Leaders, Senator Charles C. Mathias’ thoughts went back to November 22, 1963 and to the coup d’etat brought about by the surgical precision of the death of President John F. Kennedy, when he said:

Let me draw an example from history. When Thomas Becket (Saint Thomas Becket, 1118–1170) was proving to be an annoyance, as Castro; the King said Who will rid me of this man? He didn’t say to somebody, go out and murder him. He said who will rid me of this man, and let it go at that. (As you will recall, Thomas Becket’s threat was not against the King, it was against the way the King wanted to run the government.)

With no explicit orders, and with no more authority than that, four of King Henry’s knights, found and killed this man, Saint Thomas Becket inside of his church. That simple statement . . . no more than a wish floating in air . . . proved to be all the orders needed.

Then, with that great historical event in mind, Senator Mathias went on to say:

. . . that is typical of the kind of thing which might be said, which might be taken by the Director of Central Intelligence or by anybody else, as Presidential authorization to go forward . . . you felt that some spark had been transmitted . . .

To this Senator Jesse Helms added:

Yes, and if he had disappeared from the scene they would not have been unhappy.

There’s the point! Because the structure, a Power Elite, High Cabal or similar ultimate ruling organization, exists and the psychological atmosphere has been prepared, nothing more has to be said than that which ignites that spark of an assumed authorization to go forward. Very often, this is the way in which the Secret Team gets its orders . . . they are no more than a wish floating in air.

This book is about a major element of this real power structure of the world and of its impact upon the CIA and its allies around the world. It is based upon much personal experience generally derived from my military service from mid-1941 to 1964: U. S. Army Cavalry, U.S. Army Armored Force, U.S. Army Air Corps and Army Air Force, and finally the U. S. Air Force; and more specifically from my special assignments in the Pentagon from 1955 to 1964. At retirement, I was the first Chief of Special Operations with the U. S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. All of these duties, during those Pentagon years, were structured to provide the military support of the world-wide clandestine activities of the CIA. They were performed in accordance with the provisions of an Eisenhower era, National Security Council Directive No. 5412/2, March 15, 1954.

Since this book was first published in 1973, we have witnessed the unauthorized release of the Defense Department’s official history of United States involvement in Vietnam from World War II to 1969 popularly known as the Pentagon Papers, Watergate and the resignation of President Nixon, the run away activities of the Vietnam War, the Arab Oil Embargo that led to the greatest financial heist in history, the blatantly unlawful Iran Contra affair, and the runaway banking scandals of the eighties. Many of these were brought about and master minded by renegade Secret Team members who operated, without Presidential direction; without National Security Council approval so they say; and, generally, without official Congressional knowledge. This trend increases. Its scope expands . . . even today.

I pointed out, years ago in public pronouncements, that the ClA’s most important Cover Story is that of an intelligence agency. Of course the CIA does make use of intelligence and its assumed role of intelligence gathering, but that is largely a front for its primary interest, Fun and Games . . . as the Old Boys or Jedburghs of the WW II period Office of Strategic Services (OSS) called it.

The CIA is the center of a vast, and amorphous mechanism that specializes in Covert Operations . . . or as Allen Dulles always called it, Peacetime Operations. In this sense, the CIA is the willing tool of a higher level High Cabal, that may include representatives and highly skilled agents of the CIA and other instrumentality’s of the government, certain cells of the business and professional world and, almost always, foreign participation. It is this ultimate Secret Team, its allies, and its method of operation that are the principal subject of this book.

It must be made clear that at the heart of Covert Operations is the denial by the operator, i.e. the U.S. Government, of the existence of national sovereignty. The covert operator can, and does, make the world his playground . . . including the U.S.A.

Today, in the mid-1990’s, the most important events of this century are taking place with the ending of the Cold War era, and the beginning of the new age of One World under the control of businessmen and their lawyers, rather than under the threat of military power and ideological differences. This scenario for change has been brought about by a series of Secret Team operations skillfully orchestrated while the contrived hostilities of the Cold War were at their zenith.

Two important events of that period have been little noted. First, on Feb. 7, 1972, Maurice Stans, Nixon’s Secretary of Commerce opened a White House Conference on the Industrial World Ahead, A Look at Business in 1990. This three-day meeting of more than fifteen hundred of the country’s leading businessmen, scholars, and the like were concluded with this memorable summary statement by Roy L. Ash, president of Litton Industries:

. . . state capitalism may well be a form for world business in the world ahead; that the western countries are trending toward a more unified and controlled economy, having a greater effect on all business; and the communist nations are moving more and more toward a free market system. The question posed during this conference on which a number of divergent opinions arose, was whether ‘East and West’would meet some place toward the middle about 1990.

That was an astounding forecast as we consider events of the seventies and eighties and discover that his forecast, if it ever was a forecast and not a pre-planned arrangement, was right on the nose.

This amazing forecast had its antecedent pronouncements, among which was another One World speech by this same Roy Ash during the Proceedings of the American Bankers Association National Automation Conference in New York City, May 8, 9, 10, 1967.

The affairs of the world are becoming inextricably interlinked . . . governments, notably, cannot effectively perform the task of creating and distributing food and other essential products and services . . . economic development is the special capability and function of business and industrial organizations . . . business organizations are the most efficient converters of the original resources of the world into useable goods and services.

The flash of genius, the new ideas, always comes from the marvelous workings of the individual brain, not from the committee sessions. Organizations are to implement ideas, not to have them.

As a Charter Member of the American Bankers Association’s Committee on Automation Planning and Technology I was a panelist at that same convention as we worked to convert the 14,000 banks of this country to automation and the ubiquitous Credit Card. All of these subjects were signs of the times leading toward the demise of the Soviet Union in favor of an evolutionary process toward One World.

In addition to the 1972 White House Conference on the Industrial World Ahead a most significant yet quite unnoticed action took place during that same year when President Nixon and his then-Secretary of the Treasury, George Shultz, established a Russian/American organization called the USA-USSR Trade and Economic Council. Its objective was to bring about a union of the Fortune 500 Chief Executive Officers of this country, among others, such as the hierarchy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with their counterparts in the Soviet Union. This important relationship, sponsored by David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank and his associates, continues into the One World years.

This bilateral activity increased during the Reagan/Shultz years of the Eighties despite such Evil Empire staged tantrums as the Korean Airlines Boeing 747 Flight 007 shootdown in 1983.

It is this US-TEC organization, with its counterpart bilateral agreements among other nations and the USSR, that has brought about the massive changes of the former Communist world. These did not go unnoticed. During a speech delivered in 1991, Giovanni Agnelli, chief executive officer of the Fiat Company and one of the most powerful men in Europe, if not the world, remarked:

The fall of the Soviet Union is one of the very few instances in history in which a world power has been defeated on the battlefield of ideas.

Now, is this what Nixon, Stans, Shultz, Ash, Rockefeller and others had in mind during those important decades of the sixties, seventies and eighties. For one thing, it may be said quiet accurately, that these momentous events marked the end of the Cold War and have all but shredded the canopy of the nuclear umbrella over mankind.

The Cold War was the most expensive war in history. R. Buckminster Fuller wrote in Grunch of Giants:

We can very properly call World War I the million dollar war and World War II the billion dollar war and World War III (Cold War) the trillion dollar war.

The power structure that kept the Cold War at that level of cost and intensity had been spearheaded by the Secret Team and its multinational covert operations, to wit:

This is the fundamental game of the Secret Team. They have this power because they control secrecy and secret intelligence and because they have the ability to take advantage of the most modern communications system in the world, of global transportation systems, of quantities of weapons of all kinds, and when needed, the full support of a world-wide U.S. military supporting base structure. They can use the finest intelligence system in the world, and most importantly, they have been able to operate under the canopy of an assumed, ever-present enemy called Communism. It will be interesting to see what enemy develops in the years ahead. It appears that UFO’s and Aliens are being primed to fulfill that role for the future. To top all of this, there is the fact that the CIA, itself, has assumed the right to generate and direct secret operations.

—L. Fletcher Prouty

Alexandria, VA, 1997

PART I

THE SECRET TEAM

CHAPTER 1

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 Hammarskjöld, 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.

The New York Times shocked the world on Sunday, June 13, 1971, with the publication of the first elements of the Pentagon Papers.³ The first document the Times selected to print was a trip report on the situation in Saigon, credited to the Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, and dated December 21, 1963. This was the first such report on the situation in Indochina to be submitted to President Lyndon B. Johnson. It came less than thirty days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and less than sixty days after the assassinations of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam and his brother and counselor Ngo Dinh Nhu.

Whether from some inner wisdom or real prescience or merely simple random selection, the Times chose to publish first from among the three thousand pages of analysis and four thousand pages of official documents that had come into its hands that report which may stand out in history as one of the key documents affecting national policy in the past quarter-century—not so much for what it said as for what it signified. This report is a prime example of how the Secret Team, which has gained so much control over the vital foreign and political activities of this government, functions.

Most observers might have expected that the inner group of men who had worked so closely with President Kennedy for three years would have lost heart in those days following his tragic death. On the contrary, they burst forth, as though from strong bonds and fetters and created this entirely new report, thus shaping the future of the Indochina conflict. Their energy and their new sense of direction seemed almost to rise from the flame of Kennedy’s tomb in Arlington.

During those hectic months of late summer in 1963 when the Kennedy Administration appeared to be frustrated and disenchanted with the ten-year regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon, it approved the plans for the military coup d’état that would overthrow President Diem and get rid of his brother Nhu. The Kennedy Administration gave its support to a cabal of Vietnamese generals who were determined to remove the Ngos from power. Having gone so far as to withdraw its support of the Diem government and to all but openly support the coup, the Administration became impatient with delays and uncertainties from the generals in Saigon, and by late September dispatched General Maxwell D. Taylor, then Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff ( JCS), and Secretary of Defense McNamara to Saigon.

Upon their return, following a brief trip, they submitted a report to President Kennedy, which in proper chronology was the one immediately preceding the remarkable one of December 21, 1963. This earlier report said, among other things, There is no solid evidence of the possibility of a successful coup, although assassination of Diem and Nhu is always a possibility. The latter part of this sentence contained the substantive information. A coup d’état, or assassination is never certain from the point of view of the planners; but whenever United States support of the government in power is withdrawn and a possible coup d’état or assassination is not adamantly opposed, it will happen. Only three days after this report, on October 5, 1963, the White House cabled Ambassador Lodge in Saigon: There should be . . . urgent covert effort . . . to identify and build contact with possible alternate leadership. Knowledge of a statement such as this one made by the ostensible defenders and supporters of the Diem regime was all those coup planners needed to know. In less than one month Diem was dead, along with his brother.⁴

Thus, what was considered to be a first prerequisite for a more favorable climate in Vietnam was fulfilled. With the Ngo family out of the way, President Kennedy felt that he had the option to bring the war to a close on his own terms or to continue pressure with covert activities such as had been under way for many years. Because the real authors were well aware of his desires, there was another most important statement in the McNamara-Taylor report of October 2, 1963: It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time [the end of 1965]. This statement came at a key point in time.

Like the others, it was written by Secret Team insiders who knew the President’s mind and how far they could go in setting forth ideas which he would accept and yet be acceptable to their own plans. Reports such as the October 2, 1963, document were not written in Saigon and they were not written by the men whose names appeared on them.

This pivotal report was written in Washington by members of the ST. Although it contained a lot of updated material from Saigon (some of which had been transmitted to Saigon verbatim for the express purpose of having to then re-transmitted back to Washington for inclusion in the report—with the all-important Saigon dateline), one may be certain that this report contained a skillful mixture of what the President wanted to hear and what its authors in Washington wanted the President to read. Therefore, when it included the blunt and unequivocal statement that it should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time, the authors, cover and undercover, were in tune with the times. They knew the President was favorably considering means to extricate the United States from Vietnam.

The ST had had its day with Kennedy on the beaches of the Cuban Bay of Pigs. Kennedy had minutely reviewed that debacle, and from that time on he was ever alert for the slightest sign of any undercover operation that might expand and get so out of hand as to involve this country in any more such disasters. The Team had come a long way since that dismal period in April 1961, and had learned well how to use and thrive with Jack Kennedy, in spite of his caution. One way to do this was to be certain to spell things correctly—meaning hewing close to his line while retaining ST initiative. It is a safe bet to say that this forecast of personnel withdrawal by the end of 1965 was the maneuvering time they wanted and what Kennedy would accept, in their language, so that he too would have time to get re-elected and then carry out his own decisions as he had related them to Senator Mansfield. It appears that Kennedy felt that with the obstacle of the Diem regime out of the way, he would have the opportunity to disengage this nation from the war that he had so far been able to keep from becoming a runaway overt action. Up to the end of 1963, all U. S. Army troops in South Vietnam, with the exception of a small number in the Military Advisory and Assistance Group (MAAG) and a few other such positions, were there under the operational control of the CIA. This was flimsy cover and it was a poor device to maintain that the United States was not overtly involved in military activity in Indochina; but the device did achieve its purpose of keeping the level of the war to a minimum.

Within thirty days of the Taylor-McNamara report, Diem and his brother were dead. The Government of South Vietnam was in the hands