L. Fletcher Prouty

[Robin Ramsay]

The idea that Kennedy was too radical for the military-industrial complex is the thesis behind the two motion pictures about the case: the dull 1973 version. Executive Action, which starred Burt Lancaster, and Oliver Stone's JFK. Stone emphasised Vietnam: Kennedy was shot to stop withdrawal from Vietnam. This is the thesis of the late L. Fletcher Prouty, former US Air Force Colonel, who had a remarkable book. The Secret Team, published in America in 1973. Prouty was a really important insider, not only the US Air Force's liaison officer with the ClA's covert operations in the 1950s, but someone who had also been in charge of presidential security. As former liaison with the CIA, Prouty had watched the growth of the agency covert operations. As a security officer, Prouty looked at the events that day in Dallas and saw the absence of presidential security. As Prouty pointed out, the absence of security is all you need to arrange. Prouty implied, but never quite stated, that the US Secret Service had to be part of the plot. Unfortunately for Prouty his book got buried under the Watergate scandal.

Extract from Who Shot JFK (2002)

[Peter McGuire]

The idea that Kennedy was too radical for the military-industrial complex is the thesis behind the two motion pictures about the case: the dull 1973 version. Executive Action, which starred Burt Lancaster, and Oliver Stone's JFK. Stone emphasised Vietnam: Kennedy was shot to stop withdrawal from Vietnam. This is the thesis of the late L. Fletcher Prouty, former US Air Force Colonel, who had a remarkable book. The Secret Team, published in America in 1973. Prouty was a really important insider, not only the US Air Force's liaison officer with the ClA's covert operations in the 1950s, but someone who had also been in charge of presidential security. As former liaison with the CIA, Prouty had watched the growth of the agency covert operations. As a security officer, Prouty looked at the events that day in Dallas and saw the absence of presidential security. As Prouty pointed out, the absence of security is all you need to arrange. Prouty implied, but never quite stated, that the US Secret Service had to be part of the plot. Unfortunately for Prouty his book got buried under the Watergate scandal.

Extract from Who Shot JFK (2002)

I am not a big the Military - Industrial Complex did it believer, but I do believe Prouty when he says that Lansdale was in the Plaza that afternoon. A recent question asked if the CIA was involved and or did they have control over the Secret Service. So what was Lansdale doing in Dealy Plaza that afternoon?

Edited February 22, 2007 by Peter McGuire

[Sterling Seagrave]

The idea that Kennedy was too radical for the military-industrial complex is the thesis behind the two motion pictures about the case: the dull 1973 version. Executive Action, which starred Burt Lancaster, and Oliver Stone's JFK. Stone emphasised Vietnam: Kennedy was shot to stop withdrawal from Vietnam. This is the thesis of the late L. Fletcher Prouty, former US Air Force Colonel, who had a remarkable book. The Secret Team, published in America in 1973. Prouty was a really important insider, not only the US Air Force's liaison officer with the ClA's covert operations in the 1950s, but someone who had also been in charge of presidential security. As former liaison with the CIA, Prouty had watched the growth of the agency covert operations. As a security officer, Prouty looked at the events that day in Dallas and saw the absence of presidential security. As Prouty pointed out, the absence of security is all you need to arrange. Prouty implied, but never quite stated, that the US Secret Service had to be part of the plot. Unfortunately for Prouty his book got buried under the Watergate scandal.

Extract from Who Shot JFK (2002)

I am not a big the Military - Industrial Complex did it believer, but I do believe Prouty when he says that Lansdale was in the Plaza that afternoon. A recent question asked if the CIA was involved and or did they have control over the Secret Service. So what was Lansdale doing in Dealy Plaza that afternoon?

Peter ~

Lansdale was very close to HL Hunt and the Murchisons, is said to have received large sums from them for various covert ops, and was also very close to the top rung at the CIA under Dulles. Prouty had been working at G-2 in Manila in 1945 when Lansdale arrived from the USA to work in G-2. Their direct superior was Col. Joseph McMicking, during the absence in Tokyo of Gen. Willoughby (MacArthur's "lovable fascist"). Willoughby, Whitney, and MacArthur were all tight with former President Hoover and Secretary of War Stimson, and were hoping MacArthur would succeed Truman as president, a campaign being funded in part by Hoover, Hunt and the Murchisons. It was Lansdale (working with Filipino-American agent Santa Romana) who persuaded General Yamaxxxxa's chauffeur, Major Kojima, to reveal twelve sites where the Japanese had hidden gold bullion in northern Luzon -- sites to which Kojima had driven General Yamaxxxxa on inspection tours. Ultimately, the looted gold recovered from those sites was pooled with recovered Nazi gold to create a covert global slush fund through a network of banks including CIA-owned banks set up by Paul Helliwell. Lansdale and Helliwell worked together for Dulles, and Lansdale was known to be moving around East Asia with a team of assassins from the Philippines, killing leftists and war-crimes investigators. The channel used to move the gold bullion was given the name The Umbrella, combining elements from CIA, MI5, the USTreasury, Opus Dei, yakuza, and the Sicilian Mafia; later expanded to include Cuban exiles, Meyer Lansky's hit-men, and Central American death squads. It has been noted in a posting on another thread that the opening of an umbrella at Dealey Plaza is considered by some to have been "the signal". The number of people who have been linked together in multiple threads herein makes it clear that there was much more involved in the JFK killing than merely the Military-Industrial Complex, or The Octopus, or any other single element or clique. I prefer the "aggregate" theory: That JFK unfortunately made it known he was preparing to make certain changes, sack certain people, and end certrain privileges, and that this produced a "frisson" throughout so many cliques that it all syncopated in a joint effort. Most of these cliques had interlocking directorships that pervaded the entire Establishment. Brings to mind the bromide that you must never let a troop of horse trot across a wooden bridge, because their hooves syncopate, and the bridge collapses.

Sterling Seagrave

[Charles Drago]

I made the suggestion that the open umbrella in Dealey Plaza could be appreciated as the "signature" of the assassination's prime movers. After all, doesn't a mixture of hubris and mordant humor reside at the heart of evil?

For what it's worth, I've utilized this imagery (in a proprietary fashion) in a forthcoming drama. See Mr. Seagrave's second video disk for a rendering of the Umbrella's symbol as printed on documents and, if I'm not mistaken, stamped on gold bars.

Dissolve the image into that of the Dallas bumbershoot.

Which would make the Umbrella Man a bumbershooter ...

On a serious note: Would the author be aware of the existence of photos of Napoleon Valeriano c. 1963?

[Ronald R. Williams]

[originally posted on the JFK Research Forum (www.jfkresearch.com), 8/24/2002]

The Dulleses, the Bundys, and John J. McCloy: Where the Secret Team Met the Power Elite

In past posts... I have often mentioned the afterword essay in William Davy’s book Let Justice Be Done, written by Robert Spiegelman. The essay is entitled:

"Garrison’s Invitation To The Millennium Ball: Where Dallas ’63 Meets The Age Of Globalization (For the Re-Searchers Among Us)"

This is a most important piece of work that I was hoping to see discussed... This essay goes a long way toward defining a post proving-it-was-a-conspiracy research agenda in the JFK assassination case.

On page 215 we find:

It is high time to revisit the JFK assassination in a revised framework that accepts Garrison’s invitation to begin the road toward a “better explanation.” Noting that most JFK-researchers no longer ask or analyze the “whys”, it seems long overdue to kick start that enterprise by revisiting Garrison’s analyses, deconstructing some if his expressions and parlaying the result in a research agenda that returns once more to the trail of the assassins.

One of the specific recommended research agenda items is:

"Re-examine the actual, elite composition of the so-called Kennedy Administration."

From page 215

Evidence and analysis by Colby and Dennett demonstrates that the Kennedy Administration was staffed primarily by Wall Street banker and former Defense Secretary Robert Lovett and thereby composed of first-tier architects of the Cold War and Establishment icons, such as: John J. McCloy, C. Douglas Dillon, W. Averill Harriman and Paul Nitze, as well as Dean Rusk, Walt and Eugene Rostow, McGeorge and William Bundy, Allen Dulles (whose hawkish brother John Foster was Ike’s Secretary of State) and waiting in the wings, Dean Acheson.

...The Kennedy Administration was not so much staffed by “Cold Warriors” as by transnational bankers and lawyers with a long-view. They were progenitors, architects and proconsuls for the New World Order.

A further sustained study of the lives and careers of “Establishment icons” like the Dulles Brothers, the Bundy Brothers, and John J. McCloy will, I believe, take us a long way in understanding how power functions in the world, how it functioned in 1963 and functions right up to the present time.

Here is another part of the essay from page 207 that is especially relevant:

Until the end of his life, Jim Garrison had a relentless conscience and hungry consciousness that continued to plummet the “why” of Kennedy’s murder. ...(Zachary) Sklar remembers Garrison (late in life) ...charting a set of converging lines of corporate interest and political alliance which finally would intersect at Harvard Brahmin, McGeorge Bundy, JFK’s national security advisor. Garrison, notes Sklar, was becoming especially interested in the Bundy Brothers, McGeorge and his elder brother William, a former CIA official who was Dean Acheson’s son-in-law and held a significant Defense Department post on international security in the Kennedy Administration. (Researchers, of course, have long noted that in the immediate aftermath of the murder, the returning Air Force One was radioed by the White House Situation Room under Bundy’s control to fix the lone nut as the sole perpetrator--this before Oswald was even indicted.) Sklar points out that Garrison had not concluded that Bundy himself ordered or coordinated JFK’s killing; but rather that, to Garrison, Bundy represented the type of high-level player who could well have been materially involved.

Any advance in this research agenda should, of course, make use of the indispensable work of L. Fletcher Prouty. Colonel Prouty was right on the scene and saw with his own eyes how these “Establishments icons” operated and he understood that they were operatives and functionaries of great power, a power he could clearly sense, but which he did not completely understand. The Secret Team was his first attempt to define and come to terms with what he witnessed in his dealings with these icons. We are very fortunate indeed that he left us with this record, but we should recognize that this book is only a beginning. We should also recognize that this book has, in my opinion, been misused and misinterpreted by some to imply that “The Secret Team” was the real power in the world and that this power grouping somehow grew up after the passage of the National Security Act in 1947 and was centered around the CIA and the “Military Industrial Complex.” With a reading of Prouty’s second book, JFK. The CIA, Vietnam And The Plot To Assassinate John F. Kennedy, in which he begins to make use of the term “power elite,” we can start making real progress in understanding what his term the "Secret Team" means and what it does not mean.

I believe it is now clear that Prouty meant something very different when he spoke of the "Secret Team" and when he spoke of the “power elite.” In 1973, when The Secret Team was published, Prouty had a much more limited world view that he did by the time of JFK. As is very clear in JFK, he was very much influenced by Buckminster Fuller, and especially his book Critical Path. Even though JFK is a great advance in our understanding, we should recognize, here too, that this is only a beginning and that our research agenda should move on to the works of Carroll Quigley, Lloyd Miller, Lyndon LaRouche (and associates), Eustace Mullins, Antony Sutton, Donald Gibson, and others.

Because we know that Colonel Prouty was very much influenced by Buckminster Fuller and because we know that he had some knowledge of and contact with the LaRouche organization, an item in Lloyd Miller’s A-Albionic book catalog is of some interest.

Critical Path by R. Buckminster Fuller & Adjuvant Kiyoshi Kuromiya, 1981

The creator of the Geodesic Dome and coiner of the term "Spaceship Earth" in setting forth his vision for the future of mankind adumbrates his insightful theory of the covert world-rule "Great Pirates." Many suspect that Fuller was the unacknowledged source of Lyndon LaRouche's theories, including much of his opposition to the no-growth ecology extremism of the "Great Pirate's" "Court Intellectuals"! Fuller does not condemn "environmentalism" with the same extremism as LaRouche, but does argue against no-progress extremism.

Page 58-59: "It seems strange that we were not taught about the historical, philosophical, and economic significance of the foregoing transition to a closed-sphere world system (from infinite plane world view). Because the churches were strong and the "Great Pirates" wished to obscure both their monopoly of the riches of the now limited system and their grand world ocean strategy for its control, the significance of the concept of a closed world system was popularly unrealized. The power structure and its patronized educational systems 'let well enough alone'." (!!)

Ron Williams

[Peter McGuire]

The idea that Kennedy was too radical for the military-industrial complex is the thesis behind the two motion pictures about the case: the dull 1973 version. Executive Action, which starred Burt Lancaster, and Oliver Stone's JFK. Stone emphasised Vietnam: Kennedy was shot to stop withdrawal from Vietnam. This is the thesis of the late L. Fletcher Prouty, former US Air Force Colonel, who had a remarkable book. The Secret Team, published in America in 1973. Prouty was a really important insider, not only the US Air Force's liaison officer with the ClA's covert operations in the 1950s, but someone who had also been in charge of presidential security. As former liaison with the CIA, Prouty had watched the growth of the agency covert operations. As a security officer, Prouty looked at the events that day in Dallas and saw the absence of presidential security. As Prouty pointed out, the absence of security is all you need to arrange. Prouty implied, but never quite stated, that the US Secret Service had to be part of the plot. Unfortunately for Prouty his book got buried under the Watergate scandal.

Extract from Who Shot JFK (2002)

I am not a big the Military - Industrial Complex did it believer, but I do believe Prouty when he says that Lansdale was in the Plaza that afternoon. A recent question asked if the CIA was involved and or did they have control over the Secret Service. So what was Lansdale doing in Dealy Plaza that afternoon?

Peter ~

Lansdale was very close to HL Hunt and the Murchisons, is said to have received large sums from them for various covert ops, and was also very close to the top rung at the CIA under Dulles. Prouty had been working at G-2 in Manila in 1945 when Lansdale arrived from the USA to work in G-2. Their direct superior was Col. Joseph McMicking, during the absence in Tokyo of Gen. Willoughby (MacArthur's "lovable fascist"). Willoughby, Whitney, and MacArthur were all tight with former President Hoover and Secretary of War Stimson, and were hoping MacArthur would succeed Truman as president, a campaign being funded in part by Hoover, Hunt and the Murchisons. It was Lansdale (working with Filipino-American agent Santa Romana) who persuaded General Yamaxxxxa's chauffeur, Major Kojima, to reveal twelve sites where the Japanese had hidden gold bullion in northern Luzon -- sites to which Kojima had driven General Yamaxxxxa on inspection tours. Ultimately, the looted gold recovered from those sites was pooled with recovered Nazi gold to create a covert global slush fund through a network of banks including CIA-owned banks set up by Paul Helliwell. Lansdale and Helliwell worked together for Dulles, and Lansdale was known to be moving around East Asia with a team of assassins from the Philippines, killing leftists and war-crimes investigators. The channel used to move the gold bullion was given the name The Umbrella, combining elements from CIA, MI5, the USTreasury, Opus Dei, yakuza, and the Sicilian Mafia; later expanded to include Cuban exiles, Meyer Lansky's hit-men, and Central American death squads. It has been noted in a posting on another thread that the opening of an umbrella at Dealey Plaza is considered by some to have been "the signal". The number of people who have been linked together in multiple threads herein makes it clear that there was much more involved in the JFK killing than merely the Military-Industrial Complex, or The Octopus, or any other single element or clique. I prefer the "aggregate" theory: That JFK unfortunately made it known he was preparing to make certain changes, sack certain people, and end certrain privileges, and that this produced a "frisson" throughout so many cliques that it all syncopated in a joint effort. Most of these cliques had interlocking directorships that pervaded the entire Establishment. Brings to mind the bromide that you must never let a troop of horse trot across a wooden bridge, because their hooves syncopate, and the bridge collapses.

Sterling Seagrave

Sterling: Thank you for your response,

Peter

[Terry Mauro]

[originally posted on the JFK Research Forum (www.jfkresearch.com), 8/24/2002]

The Dulleses, the Bundys, and John J. McCloy: Where the Secret Team Met the Power Elite

In past posts... I have often mentioned the afterword essay in William Davy’s book Let Justice Be Done, written by Robert Spiegelman. The essay is entitled:

"Garrison’s Invitation To The Millennium Ball: Where Dallas ’63 Meets The Age Of Globalization (For the Re-Searchers Among Us)"

This is a most important piece of work that I was hoping to see discussed... This essay goes a long way toward defining a post proving-it-was-a-conspiracy research agenda in the JFK assassination case.

On page 215 we find:

It is high time to revisit the JFK assassination in a revised framework that accepts Garrison’s invitation to begin the road toward a “better explanation.” Noting that most JFK-researchers no longer ask or analyze the “whys”, it seems long overdue to kick start that enterprise by revisiting Garrison’s analyses, deconstructing some if his expressions and parlaying the result in a research agenda that returns once more to the trail of the assassins.

One of the specific recommended research agenda items is:

"Re-examine the actual, elite composition of the so-called Kennedy Administration."

From page 215

Evidence and analysis by Colby and Dennett demonstrates that the Kennedy Administration was staffed primarily by Wall Street banker and former Defense Secretary Robert Lovett and thereby composed of first-tier architects of the Cold War and Establishment icons, such as: John J. McCloy, C. Douglas Dillon, W. Averill Harriman and Paul Nitze, as well as Dean Rusk, Walt and Eugene Rostow, McGeorge and William Bundy, Allen Dulles (whose hawkish brother John Foster was Ike’s Secretary of State) and waiting in the wings, Dean Acheson.

...The Kennedy Administration was not so much staffed by “Cold Warriors” as by transnational bankers and lawyers with a long-view. They were progenitors, architects and proconsuls for the New World Order.

A further sustained study of the lives and careers of “Establishment icons” like the Dulles Brothers, the Bundy Brothers, and John J. McCloy will, I believe, take us a long way in understanding how power functions in the world, how it functioned in 1963 and functions right up to the present time.

Here is another part of the essay from page 207 that is especially relevant:

Until the end of his life, Jim Garrison had a relentless conscience and hungry consciousness that continued to plummet the “why” of Kennedy’s murder. ...(Zachary) Sklar remembers Garrison (late in life) ...charting a set of converging lines of corporate interest and political alliance which finally would intersect at Harvard Brahmin, McGeorge Bundy, JFK’s national security advisor. Garrison, notes Sklar, was becoming especially interested in the Bundy Brothers, McGeorge and his elder brother William, a former CIA official who was Dean Acheson’s son-in-law and held a significant Defense Department post on international security in the Kennedy Administration. (Researchers, of course, have long noted that in the immediate aftermath of the murder, the returning Air Force One was radioed by the White House Situation Room under Bundy’s control to fix the lone nut as the sole perpetrator--this before Oswald was even indicted.) Sklar points out that Garrison had not concluded that Bundy himself ordered or coordinated JFK’s killing; but rather that, to Garrison, Bundy represented the type of high-level player who could well have been materially involved.

Any advance in this research agenda should, of course, make use of the indispensable work of L. Fletcher Prouty. Colonel Prouty was right on the scene and saw with his own eyes how these “Establishments icons” operated and he understood that they were operatives and functionaries of great power, a power he could clearly sense, but which he did not completely understand. The Secret Team was his first attempt to define and come to terms with what he witnessed in his dealings with these icons. We are very fortunate indeed that he left us with this record, but we should recognize that this book is only a beginning. We should also recognize that this book has, in my opinion, been misused and misinterpreted by some to imply that “The Secret Team” was the real power in the world and that this power grouping somehow grew up after the passage of the National Security Act in 1947 and was centered around the CIA and the “Military Industrial Complex.” With a reading of Prouty’s second book, JFK. The CIA, Vietnam And The Plot To Assassinate John F. Kennedy, in which he begins to make use of the term “power elite,” we can start making real progress in understanding what his term the "Secret Team" means and what it does not mean.

I believe it is now clear that Prouty meant something very different when he spoke of the "Secret Team" and when he spoke of the “power elite.” In 1973, when The Secret Team was published, Prouty had a much more limited world view that he did by the time of JFK. As is very clear in JFK, he was very much influenced by Buckminster Fuller, and especially his book Critical Path. Even though JFK is a great advance in our understanding, we should recognize, here too, that this is only a beginning and that our research agenda should move on to the works of Carroll Quigley, Lloyd Miller, Lyndon LaRouche (and associates), Eustace Mullins, Antony Sutton, Donald Gibson, and others.

Because we know that Colonel Prouty was very much influenced by Buckminster Fuller and because we know that he had some knowledge of and contact with the LaRouche organization, an item in Lloyd Miller’s A-Albionic book catalog is of some interest.

Critical Path by R. Buckminster Fuller & Adjuvant Kiyoshi Kuromiya, 1981

The creator of the Geodesic Dome and coiner of the term "Spaceship Earth" in setting forth his vision for the future of mankind adumbrates his insightful theory of the covert world-rule "Great Pirates." Many suspect that Fuller was the unacknowledged source of Lyndon LaRouche's theories, including much of his opposition to the no-growth ecology extremism of the "Great Pirate's" "Court Intellectuals"! Fuller does not condemn "environmentalism" with the same extremism as LaRouche, but does argue against no-progress extremism.

Page 58-59: "It seems strange that we were not taught about the historical, philosophical, and economic significance of the foregoing transition to a closed-sphere world system (from infinite plane world view). Because the churches were strong and the "Great Pirates" wished to obscure both their monopoly of the riches of the now limited system and their grand world ocean strategy for its control, the significance of the concept of a closed world system was popularly unrealized. The power structure and its patronized educational systems 'let well enough alone'." (!!)

Ron Williams

*******************************************************************

"I believe it is now clear that Prouty meant something very different when he spoke of the "Secret Team" and when he spoke of the “power elite.” In 1973, when The Secret Team was published, Prouty had a much more limited world view that he did by the time of JFK. As is very clear in JFK, he was very much influenced by Buckminster Fuller, and especially his book Critical Path. Even though JFK is a great advance in our understanding, we should recognize, here too, that this is only a beginning and that our research agenda should move on to the works of Carroll Quigley, Lloyd Miller, Lyndon LaRouche (and associates), Eustace Mullins, Antony Sutton, Donald Gibson, and others."

Ron, thank you for bringing the totality of these players and their part in the puzzle to the forefront. And, most importantly for mentioning the works of Quigley, Miller, LaRouche, Mullins, Sutton, Gibson, et.al. in the same breath with Prouty, and Garrison. These researchers are the ones I consider to be the pinnacle of importance to understanding what was going on behind the scenes, and WHY the assassination(s) were allowed to take place. These authors go right to the heart of the matter. Once you've read their works, you then realize the futileness and insignificance of allowing yourself to become any further bogged down with the mechanics of the shooting, or with trying to analyze the footage of piece of film. These authors give you the correct answer, along with the explanation as to, as you succinctly put it, "why" this was allowed to go down, and allowed to "stand" for the last forty years.

[John Korienek]

The idea that Kennedy was too radical for the military-industrial complex is the thesis behind the two motion pictures about the case: the dull 1973 version. Executive Action, which starred Burt Lancaster, and Oliver Stone's JFK. Stone emphasised Vietnam: Kennedy was shot to stop withdrawal from Vietnam. This is the thesis of the late L. Fletcher Prouty, former US Air Force Colonel, who had a remarkable book. The Secret Team, published in America in 1973. Prouty was a really important insider, not only the US Air Force's liaison officer with the ClA's covert operations in the 1950s, but someone who had also been in charge of presidential security. As former liaison with the CIA, Prouty had watched the growth of the agency covert operations. As a security officer, Prouty looked at the events that day in Dallas and saw the absence of presidential security. As Prouty pointed out, the absence of security is all you need to arrange. Prouty implied, but never quite stated, that the US Secret Service had to be part of the plot. Unfortunately for Prouty his book got buried under the Watergate scandal.

Extract from Who Shot JFK (2002)

I think that somewhere along the line someone might bring up the idea that Prouty was a CIA asset. He certainly was not persona non grata within the Intelligence community.

According to info found just googling around, Prouty received an MBA in, of all things, Banking, when he "retired" from the military, and was the banker for the retired CIA types.

If his books are viewed from the perspective that he was a CIA asset, one can begin to wonder how much spin is attached to all the information he does present in his books and articles.

At the very least, he continues the long-established trend that the Kennedy assassination was a very unfortunate, but isolated, incident in the drama of the Cold War.

There are articulate people these days who view Kennedy's death as part of a greater conspiracy, the NWO conspiracy. Kennedy and his brother were obstructing the time-table laid down by the master-planners of the coming-to-fruition conspiracy of this larger conspiracy.

[Ron Ecker]

If his books are viewed from the perspective that he was a CIA asset, one can begin to wonder how much spin is attached to all the information he does present in his books and articles.

You raise a real possibility, when one considers that some of the information he presented in his books and articles, particularly from the standpoint of first-hand knowledge, turned out to be incorrect or misleading.

A prime example is his story of three boats used for the Bay of Pigs ostensibly renamed by or with George H.W. Bush in mind. Bush-related names connected to those boats turned out to be baloney, though Mark Lane fell for it too. (This has been covered in detail elsewhere, including Prouty's apparently false claim that he himself had acquired these boats from shipyards or wherever for use in the BOP operation.) There are also the questions he raised about the JFK Cabinet's flight to Japan, questions that were easily answered with a little research, showing that he had no idea (or pretended to have no idea) what he was talking about. And there is the myth of his background in presidential security, the idea that he might well have been in Dallas looking out for the president had he not been sent to the Pole, coupled with the Prouty-promoted myth of a military stand-down in Dallas that day. Both of these myths were dismantled in his ARRB interview, an embarrassing fiasco.

It also remains curious to me that he insisted that Ed Lansdale was photographed in Dealey Plaza, when to me the man in question looks more like Maxwell Taylor, whom Prouty also knew. This also has been discussed elsewhere in detail.

Criticism of Prouty is not taken kindly by some researchers for whatever reason. But if I or others find crap or misleading or questionable info in some of the stuff that he or anyone else wrote, I think it should be pointed out.

[Terry Mauro]

The idea that Kennedy was too radical for the military-industrial complex is the thesis behind the two motion pictures about the case: the dull 1973 version. Executive Action, which starred Burt Lancaster, and Oliver Stone's JFK. Stone emphasised Vietnam: Kennedy was shot to stop withdrawal from Vietnam. This is the thesis of the late L. Fletcher Prouty, former US Air Force Colonel, who had a remarkable book. The Secret Team, published in America in 1973. Prouty was a really important insider, not only the US Air Force's liaison officer with the ClA's covert operations in the 1950s, but someone who had also been in charge of presidential security. As former liaison with the CIA, Prouty had watched the growth of the agency covert operations. As a security officer, Prouty looked at the events that day in Dallas and saw the absence of presidential security. As Prouty pointed out, the absence of security is all you need to arrange. Prouty implied, but never quite stated, that the US Secret Service had to be part of the plot. Unfortunately for Prouty his book got buried under the Watergate scandal.

Extract from Who Shot JFK (2002)

I think that somewhere along the line someone might bring up the idea that Prouty was a CIA asset. He certainly was not persona non grata within the Intelligence community.

According to info found just googling around, Prouty received an MBA in, of all things, Banking, when he "retired" from the military, and was the banker for the retired CIA types.

If his books are viewed from the perspective that he was a CIA asset, one can begin to wonder how much spin is attached to all the information he does present in his books and articles.

At the very least, he continues the long-established trend that the Kennedy assassination was a very unfortunate, but isolated, incident in the drama of the Cold War.

There are articulate people these days who view Kennedy's death as part of a greater conspiracy, the NWO conspiracy. Kennedy and his brother were obstructing the time-table laid down by the master-planners of the coming-to-fruition conspiracy of this larger conspiracy.

********************************************************

"At the very least, he continues the long-established trend that the Kennedy assassination was a very unfortunate, but isolated, incident in the drama of the Cold War. There are articulate people these days who view Kennedy's death as part of a greater conspiracy, the NWO conspiracy. Kennedy and his brother were obstructing the time-table laid down by the master-planners of the coming-to-fruition conspiracy of this larger conspiracy."

And, anyone who thinks otherwise, is clearly bogged down in the non-essentials of the case, and will forever be chasing their own tails into perpetuity. Which, is exactly what the power structure was counting on when they laid the groundwork, so very intricately and thoroughly as to prolong the case from ever being brought to fruition.

You may question Prouty, and even choose to discredit him as Ron does. But, the fact remains that Prouty, along with the much maligned Garrison, opened the door to many unanswered questions, if not unheard of and inconceivable, to the general populace, at the time. Which, was the distinct possibility that your ever so hallowed government might not be operating with your best interests at heart, if in fact they ever were, in the first place.

How else then, should one have had access to the houses of the holy, if not been priviledged to have walked through them, and observed them in action. For instance, if compartmentalization is the nature of the game of the operatives, and in the case of information and data accredited to one which, later may appear to be skewed or at odds with more recently released information, so as to appear to discredit the former, may it not be viewed from the perspective of how the mechanics of compartmentalization serve the purpose of its intention, and not kill the messenger who chose to reveal it?

[Ron Ecker]

You may question Prouty, and even choose to discredit him as Ron does. But, the fact remains that Prouty, along with the much maligned Garrison, opened the door to many unanswered questions, if not unheard of and inconceivable, to the general populace, at the time.

I'm not trying to discredit Prouty, at least not completely, I'm pointing out things he got wrong, sometimes deliberately, which is significant and enigmatic. But I agree he helped open the door to questions, and I think Stone using him as the basis for "Mr. X" in his movie was a good dramatic device.

[Jack White]

If his books are viewed from the perspective that he was a CIA asset, one can begin to wonder how much spin is attached to all the information he does present in his books and articles.

You raise a real possibility, when one considers that some of the information he presented in his books and articles, particularly from the standpoint of first-hand knowledge, turned out to be incorrect or misleading.

A prime example is his story of three boats used for the Bay of Pigs ostensibly renamed by or with George H.W. Bush in mind. Bush-related names connected to those boats turned out to be baloney, though Mark Lane fell for it too. (This has been covered in detail elsewhere, including Prouty's apparently false claim that he himself had acquired these boats from shipyards or wherever for use in the BOP operation.) There are also the questions he raised about the JFK Cabinet's flight to Japan, questions that were easily answered with a little research, showing that he had no idea (or pretended to have no idea) what he was talking about. And there is the myth of his background in presidential security, the idea that he might well have been in Dallas looking out for the president had he not been sent to the Pole, coupled with the Prouty-promoted myth of a military stand-down in Dallas that day. Both of these myths were dismantled in his ARRB interview, an embarrassing fiasco.

It also remains curious to me that he insisted that Ed Lansdale was photographed in Dealey Plaza, when to me the man in question looks more like Maxwell Taylor, whom Prouty also knew. This also has been discussed elsewhere in detail.

Criticism of Prouty is not taken kindly by some researchers for whatever reason. But if I or others find crap or misleading or questionable info in some of the stuff that he or anyone else wrote, I think it should be pointed out.

Ron...instead of making groundless claims against Prouty, I suggest that

you provide documentation for your claims. Prouty was one of the finest

patriots and researchers I ever met, and I find your vendetta unjustified.

Jack

[Jack White]

If his books are viewed from the perspective that he was a CIA asset, one can begin to wonder how much spin is attached to all the information he does present in his books and articles.

You raise a real possibility, when one considers that some of the information he presented in his books and articles, particularly from the standpoint of first-hand knowledge, turned out to be incorrect or misleading.

A prime example is his story of three boats used for the Bay of Pigs ostensibly renamed by or with George H.W. Bush in mind. Bush-related names connected to those boats turned out to be baloney, though Mark Lane fell for it too. (This has been covered in detail elsewhere, including Prouty's apparently false claim that he himself had acquired these boats from shipyards or wherever for use in the BOP operation.) There are also the questions he raised about the JFK Cabinet's flight to Japan, questions that were easily answered with a little research, showing that he had no idea (or pretended to have no idea) what he was talking about. And there is the myth of his background in presidential security, the idea that he might well have been in Dallas looking out for the president had he not been sent to the Pole, coupled with the Prouty-promoted myth of a military stand-down in Dallas that day. Both of these myths were dismantled in his ARRB interview, an embarrassing fiasco.

It also remains curious to me that he insisted that Ed Lansdale was photographed in Dealey Plaza, when to me the man in question looks more like Maxwell Taylor, whom Prouty also knew. This also has been discussed elsewhere in detail.

Criticism of Prouty is not taken kindly by some researchers for whatever reason. But if I or others find crap or misleading or questionable info in some of the stuff that he or anyone else wrote, I think it should be pointed out.

Ron...instead of making groundless claims against Prouty, I suggest that

you provide documentation for your claims. Prouty was one of the finest

patriots and researchers I ever met, and I find your vendetta unjustified.

Jack

[Ron Ecker]

Ron...instead of making groundless claims against Prouty, I suggest that

you provide documentation for your claims. Prouty was one of the finest

patriots and researchers I ever met, and I find your vendetta unjustified.

I have previously documented these claims. You can blame the documents, not me. This is not a vendetta, it's called research. I'm sure Prouty was a patriot. I never met him. I'm talking about his work.

For the presidential security and military stand-down myths as debunked in Prouty's own ARRB interview, you can read the interview, and ARRB memos about it, on Larry Hancock's CD "Keys to the Conspiracy." It's rather depressing reading.

His seemingly clueless questions and comments about the Cabinet flight to Japan are covered in this article:

The Tokyo Flight

If I can find what I previously wrote about the three BOP boats, I'll repost it.

Edited February 27, 2007 by Ron Ecker

[Ron Ecker]

In the thread "George H.W. Bush and Assassination of JFK," the following was quoted on 4/15/06 from an article by Steve Kangas (confused with Paul Kangas):

Recently I interviewed former CIA liaison officer L. Fletcher Prouty. He is a consultant for the excellent new movie on how the CIA killed JFK, being made by Oliver Stone. He told me that one of the projects he did for the CIA was in 1961 to deliver US Navy ships from a Navy ship yard to the CIA agents in Guatemala planning the invasion of Cuba. He said he delivered three ships to a CIA agent named George Bush, who had the 3 ships painted to look like they were civilian ships. That CIA agent then named the 3 ships after: his wife, his home town and his oil company. He named the ships: Barbara, Houston & Zapata. Any book on the history of the Bay of Pigs will prove the names of those 3 ships.

I replied on 4/15/06:

As this passage shows, Kangas has to be read with care, as he was careless with his facts. The last quoted sentence is flat wrong, yet he states it for emphasis. And what is his source? Fletcher Prouty. Mark Lane also quotes Prouty on the same subject in his book Plausible Denial, indeed Lane uses what Prouty told him to end his book on a dramatic note. Good drama perhaps, but misinformation as history.

Prouty told Lane that he secured two "ships," the Barbara and the Houston, for the invasion. But Prouty told Kangas that he secured three ships, the Barbara, Houston, and Zapata. Which was it? It doesn't matter, as in either case it appears to be another Prouty tall tale.

According to the CIA's Grayston Lynch, who took part in the invasion, "the CIA procured six cargo ships from the Cuban-owned Garcia Line," these being the Carbie, Atlantico, Houston, Rio Escondido, and Lake Charles (Decision for Disaster, p. 33). (Prouty told Lane that he procured the Barbara and Houston from the Navy.) There is no indication that the Houston or any other of these six ships was previously named something else. There was no ship named Barbara involved before or after. There was no ship named Zapata involved before or after.

The invasion convoy included two LCIs (Landing Craft Infantry), one named the Blagar, of which Lynch was the case officer, and one named the Barbara J, of which Rip Robertson was the case officer. There is no J associated in any way with the name of George Bush's wife.

John Geraghty posted the following on 5/3/06:

Just to settle it i emailed the Bush library, Barbara Bush has no middle name and her maiden name is Pierce, as far as I can see (barring a nickname or inside joke) the J has nothing to do with Barbara Bush.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...c=964&st=30