Now today, in looking at this morning's news on the internet, I've stumbled across an online book: The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World by L. Fletcher Prouty*, Col., U.S. Air Force (Ret.), 1997.
PART I THE SECRET TEAM (The Real Power Structure)
PART II THE CIA: HOW IT RUNS
PART III THE CIA: HOW IT IS ORGANIZED
PART IV THE CIA: SOME EXAMPLES THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
I'll excerpt a few paragraphs from the final chapter and then make a few comments.
| John Kennedy rode into office on the shoulders of strong CIA support, re-appointed Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover, and then crashed against the beaches of Cuba with the leaderless Bay of Pigs operational disaster. This episode, coming as it did at the very threshold of his term, awakened him abruptly to the stark realities, gross ineptitude, and sudden dangers of secret operations; and it caused him to study with great care what had gone wrong and where the inherent dangers lay. Supreme Court Justice William 0. Douglas recalling a discussion he and Kennedy had about the Bay of Pigs said, "This episode seared him. He had experienced the extreme power that these groups had, these various insidious influences of the CIA and the Pentagon on civilian policy, and I think it raised in his own mind the specter: Can Jack Kennedy, President of the United States, ever be strong enough to really rule these two powerful agencies? I think it had a profound effect . . . it shook him up!"
The eminent, experienced, and wise Supreme Court Justice states the problem precisely when he says, "Can . . . the President of the United States ever be strong enough to really rule these two powerful agencies?" Can any President learn about, comprehend, and then believe what he has learned about this whole covert and complex subject? Can any President see in this vast mechanism, in which there is so much that is untrue and hidden, the heart and core of the real problem? Will any President be prepared to confront this staggering realization when and if he does uncover it? Is this perhaps the great discovery which President Kennedy made, or was about to make? It is not just the CIA and the DOD that are involved. It is also the FBI, the AEC, the DIA, elements of State and of the Executive Office Building, NSA and the hidden pulse of secret power coursing through almost every area of the body politic. It extends beyond into governmental business, the academic world, and certain very influential sectors of the press, radio, TV, papers, magazines, and the publishing business. Before any President can rule this covert automatic control system, he must find out it is there -- he must be aware of the fact it exists -- and he must devise some means to discover its concealed activity. ...Harry Truman had observed what happened in Dallas [November 1963, Kennedy assassination] from a position once removed. He pondered the significance of that hour, and one month later he wrote: "For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making army of the government. . . I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment that I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so much removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda." Who knows the thoughts that passed through his mind during those thirty days from November 22 to December 22 in 1963, thoughts that led him to write those powerful and intense words? What "disturbed" him? Who had "diverted" the Agency? How was it "injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations"? Who did it? And how was the CIA "much removed from its intended role, having become a symbol of sinister and mysterious intrigue"? Two wise men, much experienced in the terrible pressures of government, Harry S. Truman and William O. Douglas, came up with similar conclusions, one after Kennedy's searing lesson at the Bay of Pigs and the other after his tragic death in Dallas. Both of them saw sinister intrigue and the extreme power of these two groups, the CIA and the Pentagon. Both saw the various insidious influences of the CIA and the Pentagon, and both wondered as Douglas asked, "Can any President ever be strong enough really to rule?" ...We have described the ST. We have talked about who it is, what it does, how it operates. But it would be impossible to uncover everything about it and to attribute to it all that it really is. Likewise, it would be wrong to grant to this cybernetic, automatic-control machine more wisdom, more power, more sense than it really possesses. The worst possible mistake would be to overestimate it. It is not just one finite team of individuals. It is a matrix that changes with the gestation of each new operation. It is a sinister device of opportunity and contrivance. What does exist is the mechanism. What exists is the automatic system, much like a nervous system or an electrical system. More properly, what exists is like a giant electronic data processing machine, on the model of Ross Ashby's idea, which has its own power to grow, to reproduce, and to become more insidiously effective and efficient as it operates. It is a great intragovernmental infrastructure that is fed by inputs from all sources. It can be driven by the faceless, lobbying pressure of a helicopter manufacturer, or of a giant Cam Ranh Bay general contractor. It can be accelerated by the many small pushes of hundreds of thousands of career military personnel -- uniformed and civilian -- who see higher rank and higher retirement pay as a goal worth seeking. It can be suddenly activated by almost any "counterinsurgency" area or similar "hot button" initiator. This great machine has been constructed by such able men as "Wild Bill" Donovan, Clark Clifford, Walter Beedle Smith, Allen Dulles, Maxwell Taylor, McGeorge Bundy, and many others, who have guided and molded it into the runaway giant that it is today. It is big business, big government, big money, big pressure, and headless -- all operating in self-centered, utterly self-serving security and secrecy. As C. P. Snow has said, "The euphoria of secrecy goes to the head." And as Allen Dulles has said, perhaps in a slightly different context, this is really the craft of intelligence. For all its fabrication and apparent unreality, especially in this open society, the ST machine does have a central soul or brain. . . or perhaps. . . holy spirit. It is the evidence of a form of new religion. It has its secrets. It has its divine and unquestioned rights and obligations. It has self-righteous power over life and death. It does not believe in anything. It does not value anything. It is utterly ruthless. Its greatest motivating force and drive is entirely undefined, because it moves by pressure. It reacts. It is therefore blind, meaningless, senseless. It will do anything in the name of anti-Communism. Yet in its greatest anti-Communist war it sees no inconsistency in the killing of one of its most anti-Communist creations -- Ngo Dinh Diem. In its zeal to rid the Caribbean of Communism, it leaps at the chance to rid the Dominican Republic of Latin America's strongest non-Communist, Rafael Trujillo. Any person or groups that know how to get to this infrastructure, who have the clearances, who have the need-to-know, can make an input into this ST, and as long as the desired action is anti-Communist, the system will operate. |
Interestingly, the book I am now reading, Killing Hope (2001), about CIA and military involvement in foreign countries since the end of WWII, is saying the same thing - that an irrational anti-communism is the overriding drive of all our foreign affairs. And it's making a good case of it.
The question Col. Prouty asks in The Secret Team - can a president ever be strong enough to rule? - I think is essentially rhetorical at this point. We know that he doesn't, and believe that he can't.
In my view, there's a fundamental basis to the existence of mankind - duality, which, when taken beyond the natural physical laws of our universe into the realm of thought and action, always seems to assume duplicity. So that, for the sake of maintaining duality perhaps (or just being true to natural law), man needs an opposition - another team, an opponent. And, engaging the opponent requires duplicity. Faced with a situation lacking a natural opponent, man must create one. This is irrational, of course, but man is a product of nature, and nature is not rational - it is simply bound by certain natural laws. And, once man forms societies and states, those structures subsume the individuals and function under the same laws, but without the benefit of reason, making them even further removed from rational action than the individuals themselves.
It appears, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, that for Western man, Communism has given way to an Islamic opponent. But that may be superficial, in that the Islamic opponent is not a free-market capitalist, and therefore, it is perhaps not communism per se, but non-capitalism that is the opponent. (But then, here in the United States, we tend to portray anything that is non-capitalist as communist.) Of course, that's a simplistic view of a more complex dynamic, but it might answer for what drives the machine of State - or, the Secret Team.
Col. Prouty suggests that we can fix this problem by exposing the CIA and denying it the power to do anything but gather intelligence. I'm much more fatalistic than Col. Prouty, however. And, while I definitely support the idea of bringing all secrets into the open, I honestly do not believe that we can change the fundamental laws of our universe, which call for duality. So, I think we will always have destruction if we have construction, but if we could halt the destruction of man (assuming that something else will take the place of man's destructive activity), it will take something much more basic than curtailing the CIA - and much more difficult. I think it will take a recognition of our duality, and an acceptance of it - in this case, capitalism will have to accept communism. Christianity will have to accept Islam. And vice-versa.
It does seem to me that Islam and communism, with some militant exceptions, have been more willing to accept Christianity and capitalism than those systems have been accepting of the other. (Unless you accept the notion that communists are perpetually trying to take over the world, which I don't see the evidence of.) There's a reason there somewhere, I'm sure.
It's kind of interesting to see the evolution of why we're supposed to hate and fear Communists/Islamics. When I was quite young it was because they were trying to take us over. The Communists were wanting to turn us into Reds (better dead than Red). I don't remember anything about Islamics back then, but we fundamentalists had our Catholic bogeymen who were trying to turn the whole world into Catholics (which may actually be true, come to think of it - fundamentalists have no such goal - they essentially want the rest of you to hurry up and die).
The justification for opposing them eventually evolved into the Commies and Islamics being jealous of us, and so were trying to destroy our way of life. (If we can't have nice things, then we're not going to let you have them, either.) Perhaps that change in reasoning happened when it had become crystal clear that they were in no danger of converting us.
And now, it's morphed into the story that they simply want to kill us all because they are simply inherently and incorrigably evil.
God, we're gullible.
You can read The Secret Team online here.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
*About the author:
| L. Fletcher Prouty is a retired Air Force colonel who served in the Pentagon from 1955-1963 as the Focal Point liaison officer for Department of Defense support of CIA covert activities. During the Kennedy years his title was Chief, Special Operations Division, Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was a briefing officer on various special assignments dating back to the Cairo and Teheran conferences of 1943, and has also been a jet pilot and professor of air science and tactics at Yale University. Since first writing on the topic in May, 1970 for the Washington Monthly, he has made a persistent case based on his own experiences that the CIA and other secret elites are out of control. Prouty was portrayed as "Mr. X" in Oliver Stone's movie "JFK." source |
Col. Prouty died in June 2001.
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