Understanding Special Operations

By Fletcher Prouty with David Ratcliffe

Fletcher Prouty is undergoing a revival of sorts. In 2024, Jeff Carter released his film on the man, which was titled Fletcher Prouty’s Cold War. This was a well-done and quite informative biographical look at a military veteran who was in the middle of things when CIA Director Allen Dulles was at the height of his powers and influence. Prouty was also around when President John Kennedy decided that he had had enough of Dulles after the Bay of Pigs and decided that Dulles, Director of Plans Dick Bissell, and Deputy Director Charles Cabell all had to go. Prouty was also there when Kennedy was assassinated. He then retired his military commission in 1964 after 23 years of service. (Click here for a review of Carter’s film https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/review-of-fletcher-prouty-s-cold-war)

Why do I say that Prouty is in revival? Because in addition to Carter’s film, David Ratcliffe has now reissued his book on Prouty, Understanding Special Operations, in a revised and expanded version. When I say expanded, it now totals over 600 pages. It consists of a five-day interview Ratcliffe did with Prouty in 1989. And that is backed up with appendices, addenda and plentiful notes. It is a good literary supplement to Carter’s film.

Prouty had been a veteran of World War II, mostly in the Army Air Force. There, he piloted around people like General Omar Bradley in North Africa and the Middle East. Later in the war, he was transferred to the Pacific. He was in Japan when the peace treaty was signed. At war’s end, he went to Yale to start up an ROTC program. During the Korean War, he ran the Tokyo International Airport.

It was after that assignment, while still part of the Pentagon, that he became a coordinator for military supplies between the Air Force and the CIA. Translated into action, this meant that if the CIA needed an air aspect to an operation, Prouty would be the military man they would consult. Later on, when Prouty became a Colonel, CIA Director Allen Dulles transferred all duties dealing with CIA/Pentagon support to Prouty. He was now called the “focal point officer”. That was the position he retired from in 1964. Even though his commanding officer, General Victor Krulak, wanted him to stay.

Once he retired, Prouty went into banking for First National Bank, and then management for Amtrak. But, and it’s a big but, Prouty also had a career as a writer. He penned books and articles. This is an important aspect of his career because Prouty did not sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement once he left the military. Therefore, he was free to write about many of his endeavors while both in the military and as a focal point officer. His book, The Secret Team, is considered by some—the late Mort Sahl, for one—to be a milestone in the field. But something happened to The Secret Team, and to his literary career. And Ratcliffe deals with it in this book. It is a subject we will take up later.

But his literary career is important in another way. Because this is how Oliver Stone got in contact with Prouty. Jim Garrison had read some of Prouty’s articles. When his book, On the Trail of the Assassins, was ready to be published, he sent a draft copy to Prouty. Prouty read it. He then wrote to Garrison telling him how much he liked the book. Garrison showed the correspondence to his editing assistant, Zachary Sklar. Both men ended up working with film director Oliver Stone when Stone purchased the rights to Garrison’s book. Sklar and Garrison both advised Stone to get in contact with Prouty. Because he knew a lot about Kennedy’s plans to withdraw from Vietnam in the fall of 1963, and how that plan got hijacked and then reversed.

So Stone got in contact with Prouty, and he became a consultant on the 1991 film JFK. But his participation went further than that. Stone decided to make him a character in the picture. He called him Mr. X. That role was first offered to Marlon Brando. He declined. Can you imagine all the cue cards Brando would have needed for that long monologue?

As Stone has said, Brando’s refusal was a blessing in disguise. Because Donald Sutherland now played the part. Sutherland did more than play Mr. X; he owned the role. The approximately 16-minute walk of Sutherland/X with Garrison/Kevin Costner from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument has become an icon of modern cinema. For the first time in a mass audience feature film, Americans were finally seeing the covert action crimes of the CIA brilliantly conveyed through photography, newsreels and virtuoso editing. And all the time this is being depicted, Sutherland is delivering a tour de force performance. He is completely in command: through inflections, cadence, modulations in pitch and timber. Sutherland had a dog in this fight. Because he was the original producer of the film Executive Action. It’s like he recalled everything he wanted to put in that 1973 film, and poured it out in this movie-stealing performance. He is simply superb.

II

In a very real way, Sutherland was too good. Many people did not want to believe that 1.) His character could know so much, and 2.) The CIA could do all of these evil things. Which included the clear suggestion that they were in on the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. So, in order to get at Stone’s film, critics went after Fletcher Prouty. Some of these writers—like Robert Sam Anson and Edward Epstein—had personal agendas. They had viciously attacked Jim Garrison years before. They were not going to let Stone and Prouty revive him in a mass market, Oscar-nominated film—one which also made Garrison’s book a best-seller. So, in addition to going after Stone and Garrison, they decided to attack Fletcher Prouty. (Click here for Epstein https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-abstract-reality-of-edward-epstein)

And this crew included Dan Moldea. There was a debate at American University in January of 1992, supervised by Sanford Ungar. Ungar had Moldea on this panel. Moldea seemed to be there to attack Prouty—also on the panel-- and the film, which he called a paranoid fantasy. During that debate, looking directly at Prouty, he actually accused Jim Garrison of being on the payroll of Carlos Marcello. Therefore, the DA’s inquiry was a diversion from the true perpetrators of the crime. Which, in Moldea’s mind, was the Mafia. To put it mildly, Moldea’s ideas have not held up very well. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, pp 149-67) In the face of much resistance, Prouty’s and Garrison’s have.

To show how far the resentment to Stone’s film reached, the attack on Prouty extended into the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). As Doug Horne told this writer, there were some people working for the Board who decided to go after Prouty/Mr. X. So they called the colonel in for an interview. Which was not really an interview. It was an ambush. Prouty sensed this early on, and he simply played along with the charade. Not revealing any of his sources for things like the failure of military intelligence to back up the Secret Service in Dallas on 11/22/63. (Click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/fletcher-prouty-vs-the-arrb)

Finally, we should not forget the writer who ended up being the Establishment’s point man on the counter to Stone’s film. That was, of course, Gerald Posner. Posner took some swipes at Prouty in his godawful Case Closed. In Ratcliffe’s book, the colonel ably repels every detail of the long footnote Posner devoted to him. (Ratcliffe, pp. 346-47)

All of these critics had an agenda. In this writer’s view, Epstein and Anson should never have been allowed to write about Stone’s film, let alone Fletcher Prouty. Because they had made up their mind about Jim Garrison decades before. Moldea actually used a trial at which Garrison was acquitted to say that, somehow, he was on the take from Carlos Marcello. Yet, at trial, the case was exposed as a frame-up. Which included faked audio tapes and the prime witness admitting the case against the DA was a fabrication. (Garrison, Chapter 19)

III

In Understanding Special Operations, Ratcliffe uses a kind of Socratic method to question Prouty about his suppressed book, The Secret Team. Why do I call it suppressed? Because on its first issue in hardcover--through a major publisher, Prentice-Hall--the book sold well and got favorable reviews. Prentice-Hall sold the paperback rights to Ballantine Books with an expected printing of 100,000 copies. But the paperback simply began to disappear. And the owner had sold Ballantine. Prouty went to New York to visit the new owner to talk about his book’s fate. The new man said he knew nothing about Prouty or his book. Prentice-Hall then ran out of the hardcover also. That edition of the book was now more or less extinct. (Ratcliffe, p. 365)

Up until the time of the Ballantine suppression, the colonel had been published in journals like The Nation, The New Republic, and Air Force Magazine. This now forced him into having his articles published by Genesis, Gallery and Freedom magazine. As Ratcliffe notes, it is a sad state of affairs when a 23-year veteran who went as high up into the military as Prouty is reduced to such a state. (ibid, p. 479) This is the man who actually wrote a pamphlet called “Military Support of the Clandestine Operations of the United States Government.” (Ibid, p. xxiii) He then coordinated this document with those written by the Army and Navy Focal Point Offices. All three were then attached together and approved by the Defense Secretary. (ibid)

But, as the book notes, the CIA did not just arrange for this kind of military support. They also arranged a whole network of persons who were planted in other agencies of government, like the State Department, the FBI and Customs. The agencies accepting these liaisons thought they were from Defense. But they were really from the CIA. (Ratcliffe, p.xxiv). And their man would rise in the ranks of that agency, without anyone else knowing who he really was. Thus, he became even more effective.

The book also explains how money was manipulated between agencies:

The Air Force never spent any money on the CIA operations, technically. The money was immediately transferred through a comptroller’s office arrangement up in the office of the Comptroller of the Secretary of Defense. And that expenditure was actually Agency money. (p. xxv)

This is how the CIA managed to expand its budgets, by doing what were, in essence, black operations—which were, in a real way, not accountable. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is that Prouty acknowledges a decision by Eisenhower called NSC 10/2. This said that when the military supported the CIA for an operation, that equipment “was to be limited to that one time only and afterwards withdrawn.” (p. xxx) As Ratcliffe notes, this was eventually ignored, and the CIA was allowed to accumulate its own stockpiles of equipment.

Also, as time went on, Allen Dulles usurped the power of the NSC over the CIA. Instead of the former commissioning projects, Dulles went to them for approval of his own projects. This led to what, for Prouty, was a lamentable shift. Now, instead of diplomats making policy, intelligence information would lead policy-making. (p. 116, pp. 156, 157)

IV

In addition to NSC 10/2, Prouty also discusses Directive 5412. As explained to him by General Thomas White, this NSC ruling finally defined covert operations and how the Pentagon would support them, as they were really being run by the CIA (p. 42). Prouty argues that up until this time, there had really been no clear sanction for the Agency to do this. Which had not stopped CIA officer Frank Wisner from conducting them at the Office of Policy Coordination, later renamed Directorate of Plans. But with their formalization, Prouty now had his office:

We had staff all over the world, a rather large office, and special communications. I stayed in that job…until 1960, when I was assigned to the office of the Secretary of Defense, in the Office of Special Operations…. (p. 43)

After acquainting himself with the position and putting together a manual, Prouty went over to see Director Allen Dulles and CIA lead counsel Larry Houston. Final arrangements were now worked out to make the relationship effective. Like setting up dummy companies for the transfer of equipment. (p. 44). This was done under an often-used law called the Economy Act of 1932. This allowed transfers of goods and services from one to other branches of government. (ibid) As Prouty notes, it was this law that was quoted for use by Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger during the Iran/Contra affair.

Once this system was set up and ready to enact, Dulles called him into his office. He now wanted to send him on a tour of the major CIA offices around the world so Prouty could meet with some of the people -- Dulles titled them Chiefs of Station -- who were going to be calling him for requests. It was on this tour, while in Greece, that Prouty encountered a camp for what the CIA called its “mechanics”, that is, its hit men, to be used for assassinations worldwide. (p. 49) This is how this reference got into the scene with Mr. X in the film JFK.

While on this tour, Prouty visited the CIA station in Frankfurt, which was their main HQ for Europe, and the Paris station, which was where the central SHAPE -- Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe -- office was located. Prouty offers a fascinating observation he picked up there. In preparations for atomic war, the planners would allow for paratroopers to be dropped into havens called “safe areas” in the USSR. Places where bombs had not hit, and weather patterns predicted no radioactivity would fall. This was the beginning of the concepts for special forces and stay behind operations. As Prouty notes, the CIA adapted the concept and infiltrated the Agency into these kinds of operations, for example, the Green Berets in Vietnam. (p. 53, p. 135)

V

From here, the narrative delves into the disastrous covert operation to try to overthrow Sukarno in Indonesia in 1958, and then the Castro revolution in Cuba in 1959. About the former, Prouty succinctly says. “We lost everything, we accomplished nothing.” As far as it goes, that is an accurate verdict, although later scholars like Greg Poulgrain would probably take issue with it. As per the Castro revolution, Prouty slept on a cot that night, not knowing whether Castro was going to be allowed to take power. On January 1, 1959, he got the word that Castro was going to be allowed to do so. (p. 55)

This was likely a declaration that President Eisenhower came to regret. Because in March 1960, the decision came down to begin organizing the exiles and planning covert actions against Cuba. Ratcliffe uses both Prouty’s analysis of the debacle at the Bay of Pigs, along with the legendary Lyman Kirkpatrick Inspector General Report, and the work I did on that incident--contained in the revised edition of Destiny Betrayed. Based on these three, he puts together an interesting synthesis of what probably happened. (See pp. 496-99)

Prouty was operating his focal point duties in the Defense Department at this time, 1960-62. He then switched over to the staff of the Joint Chiefs for 1962-64. In the former office, he was privy to the meetings of the Taylor Committee. This was the ad hoc group set up by President Kennedy to investigate the failure of the Bay of Pigs operation. In fact, his office was two doors down from their meeting room. He would talk to “…almost everybody going in and out of there as they went, because they were all old friends I’d been working with for a long time.” (p. 63) The committee members were Allen Dulles, Admiral Arleigh Burke, General Maxwell Taylor and Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

Based on this inquiry, two things happened. First, the president removed the top level of the CIA. This included Dulles, Director of Plans Dick Bissell and Deputy Director Charles Cabell. Secondly, Kennedy issued NSAM’s 55, 56 and 57. I won’t go into the meaning of those directives since they were a major dramatic point in Oliver Stone’s film JFK. And also, Ratcliffe prints them in one of his many Appendixes. (pp. 338-42) But, generally speaking, Kennedy felt that the Joint Chiefs should never have let him go through with approving the Bay of Pigs operation. He felt they should have made clear their reservations—which they did during the Taylor hearings—and in the future for these kinds of paramilitary operations.

As noted, Prouty went from the Department of Defense to the Joint Chiefs. There, he ran something called the Office of Special Operations until he retired in 1964. His supervising officer was General Victor Krulak. Krulak was close to JFK and even closer to RFK. By September of 1963, Krulak understood what the president wanted in Vietnam. And so Krulak and Prouty began to work on Kennedy’s withdrawal program, which consisted of NSAM 263 and the accompanying Taylor/McNamara Trip Report.

As John Newman points out in his book JFK and Vietnam, although Krulak was supposed to be on the plane to Saigon for the Taylor/McNamara trip, he was actually in Washington. (Newman, p. 407) According to Newman, Prouty and Howard Jones, that is where the report was written. (Jones, Death of a Generation, p. 370) It was penned out of Krulak’s office—in close cooperation with the White House-- and Prouty worked on it. (Ratcliffe, pp. 71-72, Newman, p. 408)

Because Stone incorporated the work of Prouty and Newman on Kennedy’s withdrawal plan into his film JFK, all three men were pilloried on this issue. But then, in 1997, the Review Board declassified documents that proved that thesis. These were the records of the May 1963 Sec/Def conference in Hawaii. At that conference, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara requested withdrawal schedules from each department in Saigon. When he got them, he looked up and said the schedules were too slow. These documents convinced even the MSM that Kennedy was getting out of Vietnam. (JFK Revisited, edited by James DiEugenio, pp. 186-87). In a sense, Prouty was too far ahead of the curve. The Establishment did not want to admit that if Kennedy had lived, there would not have been a Vietnam War.

VI

Another issue in the film JFK that Prouty was attacked on was his reading of the New Zealand newspaper, the Christchurch Star, on his return from Antarctica after Kennedy’s murder. (Ratcliffe, pp. 211-15) Prouty wondered: How on earth could the newspapers have had all that information about Oswald, plus a rare picture of him, before he had even been charged for Kennedy’s assassination? One way this could have happened was not directly through the CIA, but through an asset of theirs.

According to journalist Seth Kantor, on the day of the assassination, his editor referred him to Miami News reporter Hal Hendrix for background on Oswald. And Hendrix, nicknamed ‘The Spook’, had a complete dossier on Oswald ready to go for him from his home in Coral Gables. Which just happened to be where the JM/Wave CIA station was located. When the Warren Commission published a list of Kantor’s calls that day, it did not include his call to Hendrix. Years later, it was revealed that Hendrix lied before Congress about his knowledge of the CIA coup in Chile, deposing Salvador Allende. But further, that the CIA knew Hendrix was going to commit perjury about his direct knowledge of the American role in the coup. Hendrix was later charged with perjury and turned state’s witness. (Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation, pp. 325-27)

Outside of the text of the interviews, the book is stacked with valuable notes, appendices, and addenda. An utterly fascinating one that I am glad was included was the experience of John Judge’s mother at the Pentagon in November of 1963. She worked at the Pentagon for three decades. One of her functions was to project overall national draft figures in advance. She had done this for a long time and was quite accurate in her predictions. It was her information in the fall of 1963 that Kennedy was getting out of Vietnam. After Kennedy was killed, in the last week of November, she said she was stunned by the large increase in numbers requested. She took them back to the Joint Chiefs, saying, “These can’t be right.” They told her, “You’ll use them.” (Ratcliffe, p. 363)

In addition to the above, there are references to distinguished books and authors that I was either not aware of or that I had forgotten. Prouty was a well-read man who somehow found a lot of books not in the normal canon. So is Ratcliffe. Therefore, important authors like Jerry Mander, Guy Debord, Joseph Needham, and Peter Drucker--all off the beaten track—are mentioned and described. And they seemed to me to be of stellar importance. For instance, Needham wrote what ended up as a 27-volume series entitled Science and Civilization in China. I had never heard of him or his series before. But that is how well-informed Prouty was.

This is a rich book. Done for good reasons. Fletcher Prouty took a lot of unfair criticism because of his input into JFK. When, in fact, his two major contributions to the film—Kennedy’s Vietnam withdrawal plan, and the failure of military intelligence to back up the Secret Service—were both accurate. Those vicious and unmerited blows can never be completely repaired. But David Ratcliffe and Jeff Carter have both done their best to mend over those unkind wounds.