USAF COL. Prouty, Operation BLOODSTONE, SS-Obersturmbannführer Skorzeny, & the murder of President Kennedy...

[W. Niederhut]

1 hour ago, David Josephs said:

Thank you Paul - one of the finest posts this forum has ever been offered.

  

David,

    Can you and Paul Brancato name any other JFK administration Deep State insiders, besides Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, who ever stepped forward to debunk the WCR narrative about JFK's assassination?

    Also, can someone explain how Skorzeny was involved in the CIA/Anti-Castro Cuban op (delineated by Larry Hancock, et.al.)  to assassinate JFK?

    This is now the third time I have asked that question on this disorganized thread.

[David Josephs]

@W. Niederhut  Burkley tried.  Tosh Plumlee tried but he was not JFK admin.  

It's a good question - one I'd first reply with: Give me your list of Deep State insiders within the JFK admin.  Abe Bolden was not exactly Deep State but he did try at the time to raise flags about what @Robert Montenegro reiterated about the Secret Service's dereliction of duty...  

He didn't fair too well after that.

Bottom line is not many risked opening their mouths.  Hoover also opened the door by confirming the CIA lied about Oswald in Mexico City.

One of the WCR lawyers - Redlich - wrote a most interesting memo in April 1964, attached, an excerpt:  Remember this is APRIL 1964.

The reality WN is that insiders were very careful if they wanted a career after 9/64.

So just in the name of cooperation, please list out JFK admin insiders - as many as you can name - and then look at the revelations over the years.  Questioning and countering the WCR narrative began immediately.  Debunking from the inside?  Small, hardly noticeable baby steps.

We have not yet examined the assassination scene to determine
whether the assassin in fact could have shot the President prior to
frame 190.  We could locate the position on the ground which
corresponds to this frame and it would then be our intent to establish
by photography that the assassin would have fired the first shot at the
President prior to this point.  Our intention is not to establish the point with complete accuracy, but merely to substantiate the hypothesis which underlies the conclusions that Oswald was the sole assassin.

    I had always assumed that our final report would be
accompanied by a surveyor's diagram which would indicate the
approximate location of the three shots.  We certainly cannot prepare
such a diagram without establishing that we are describing an
occurrence which is physically possible.  Our failure to do this will,
in my opinion, place this Report in jeopardy since it is a certainty
that others will examine the Zapruder films and raise the same
questions which have been raised by our examination of the films.  If
we do not attempt to answer these observable facts, others may answer
them with facts which challenge our most basic assumptions, or with
fanciful theories based on our unwillingness to test our assumptions
by the investigatory methods available to us.

    I should add that the facts which we now have in our possession, submitted to us in separate reports from the FBI and Secret Service, are totally incorrect and, if left uncorrected, will present a completely misleading picture.
 

April 27 Redlich to Rankin - the facts dont fit the conclusion.docx

Edited July 18, 2023 by David Josephs

[Jonathan Cohen]

Admiral Burkley, through his attorney, may have "attempted" to step forward to "debunk the WCR narrative," but it's quite unclear if he ever actually did. As such, he's not really a useful example per Paul's question. From the ARRB final report:

The Review Board contacted the children of deceased Vice Admiral George G. Burkley, former military White House physician to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, to find out if their father had deposited his papers at any institution, or if they possessed any assassination records. The staff came up empty-handed.

According to House Select Committee on Assassinations records, Burkley's personal attorney apparently told the HSCA that his client believed there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. Mr. Illig, Burkley's attorney, however, is now deceased. The Review Board staff asked Burkley's daughter, the executor of his estate, to sign a waiver allowing the Review Board access to papers at Illig's law firm, but she declined to sign and return the waiver.

[Robert Montenegro]

20 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

David,

    Can you and Paul Brancato name any other JFK administration Deep State insiders, besides Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, who ever stepped forward to debunk the WCR narrative about JFK's assassination?

    Also, can someone explain how Skorzeny was involved in the CIA/Anti-Castro Cuban op (delineated by Larry Hancock, et.al.)  to assassinate JFK?

    This is now the third time I have asked that question on this disorganized thread.

 

Victor Leo Marchetti Jr. was special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and served during the Kennedy Administration.

He was a critic of the Warren Report.

As for Skorzeny's role with the anti-Castro operatives, it appears he was not directly involved with them, but try this on for size, and see if it fits:

• https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP70-00058R000300010046-7.pdf

Skorzeny also met with ALPHA-66 co-founder Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, an anti-Castro terrorist:

• https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32336930.pdf
• https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32336950.pdf

Edited July 18, 2023 by Robert Montenegro

[Robert Montenegro]

27 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

This is now the third time I have asked that question on this disorganized thread.

 

I'm glad you've pointed out that this thread is disorganized.

Let's get back to my original point, shall we (something literally no one that has responded to this thread has done)?

Where was I, oh, yeah:

 

 

I realize that the very mention of USAF COL. Leroy Fletcher Prouty, sparks the imagination of even the least initiated surrounding the events of President Kennedy's violent removal.

I mean, imagine it, here is the former Chief of Special Operations, Joint Chiefs of Staff, deputy to USMC Lt. Gen. Victor Harold Krulak Special Assistant for Counter Insurgency Activities, Joint Chiefs of Staff, coming forward and saying, yes, the murder of President Kennedy was a highly organized military style coup, and it required the utilization of several overt and covert networks in order to pull it off.

COL. Prouty even awarded those networks a spiffy little moniker: "...The Secret Team.."

Spooky, right?

Well, over fifty years have passed, I have not seen any proof documented of such an aligned network of conspirators.

That is until a few weeks ago, when I got done reading a book by author Christopher Simpson.

And the information about this network of Nazi commandos and assassins was provided by interviews given to author Christopher Simpson by COL. Prouty personally.

A network of Nazi commandos and assassins that COL. Prouty says he created himself!   

 

The following passage, from pages 137 & 138 of Christopher Simpson’s “Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Destructive Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy,” which demonstrate that COL. Prouty, by his own admission, was a driving force behind creation of the United States Army’s “Special Forces” units—and that these same units later morphed into assassination teams:

 

QUOTE — "...The Bloodstone proposal was approved by SANACC, the special interagency intelligence coordinating committee, on June 10, 1948.

A month later the JCS approved a second, interlocking plan for the recruitment and training of guerrilla leaders from among the Soviet émigré groups. This initiative was a slightly modified version of the revived Vlasov Army Plan, which had originally been promoted by Kennan, Thayer and Franklin Lindsay, who later worked with many of these same guerrillas on behalf of the CIA. In their report on this second proposal the Joint Chiefs reveal that Bloodstone was part of a covert warfare, sabotage, and assassination operation...the recruitment of foreign mercenaries for political murder missions was a specific part of Operation Bloodstone from the beginning…"

— END QUOTE.

 

Perhaps not so incidentally, Franklin A. Lindsay, an OSS commando and CIA veteran of stay-behind operations in Albania and Ukraine, was the man who recruited Everette Howard Hunt Jr. into the CIA—E. Howard Hunt, utilizing the pseudonym “Eduardo” of course, was “Jerry” Droller’s subordinate in “Operation Zapata.”

 

Hunt and Lindsay were both siphoning US taxpayer funds from the Economic Cooperation Administration to covertly finance “Operation GLADIO,” via a secret slush-fund within the European Recovery Program AKA The Marshall Plan, *previously unidentified cryptonym called “...ZRCANDY...”

 

*(Could somebody contact Bill Simpich for me and get this on Mary Ferrell?)

 

ZRCANDY funds were, according to CIA cross-references, “...ECA counterpart funds turned over to CIA…”

 

Interestingly enough, Franklin A. Lindsay was president of the Itek Corporation when it stole the original Orville Nix film of the JFK murder and never returned it.

 

Of course, as Chief of Office of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, COL. Prouty was “Jerry” Droller’s liaison to USMC General Graves Blanchard Erskine, Director of Special Operations of the United States Department of Defense, organizing the creation of the anti-Castro émigré armies!

 

The mysterious "Jerry" Droller was later replaced by E. Howard Hunt as the CIA political action officer in-charge of the anti-Castro émigré effort...

 

...But I digress... 

 

Disturbing still, is the fact that Frank Lindsay’s Air Operations liaison in monstrously evil “Operation BLOODSTONE,” was US Air Force COL. Leroy Fletcher Prouty, which, once again utilizing Christopher Simpson’s “Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Destructive Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy,” this time on pages 182 to 184, we can clearly see that COL. Prouty was front-and-center in the utilization of Nazi émigrés within US Army Special Forces:

 

QUOTE —

 

"...The process of integrating ex-Nazi émigré groups into U.S. nuclear operations may be traced to at least early 1947, when General Hoyt Vandenberg became the first Chief of Staff of the newly independent US Air Force. Vandenberg had commanded the 9th Air Force in Europe during World War II, then had been tapped to head the Central Intelligence Group, the immediate predecessor to the CIA, in 1946. Among the general's responsibilities at the air force was the development of written plans describing strategies and tactics for the use of America's new nuclear weapons in the event of a war. “Vandenberg had a clear idea about just how he thought a nuclear war was going to be fought,” argues retired Colonel Fletcher Prouty, who was a senior aide to the Air Force Chief of Staff in the 1940s and later top liaison man between the Pentagon and the CIA. “[He] knew that if there was a nuclear exchange in those days—and we were talking about atomic bombs, now, not H-bombs—you would destroy the communications and lifeblood of a country, but the country would still exist. It would just be rubble. People would be wandering around wanting to know who was boss and where the food was coming from and so forth, but the country would still be there." Therefore the US thinking went, “we must begin [to create independent communication centers inside the Soviet Union] after the nuclear blast and begin to pull it together for our ends.”

The army, air force, and CIA all began competing programs to prepare for the post nuclear battlefield. This included the creation of what eventually came to be called the Special Forces—better known today as the Green Berets—in the army and the air resupply and communication wings in the air force. The job of these units, Prouty explains, was to set up anti-Communist political leaders backed up by guerrilla armies inside the USSR and Eastern Europe in the wake of an atomic war, capture political power in strategic sections of the country, choke off any remaining communist resistance, and ensure that the Red Army could not regroup for a counterattack. “Somebody had to bring order back into the country, and before the Communists could do it we were going to come flying in there and do it,” Prouty says.

“The Eastern European and Russian émigré groups we had picked up from the Germans were the center of this; they were the personnel,” according to the retired colonel. “The CIA was to prepare these forces in peacetime; stockpile weapons, radios, and Jeeps for them to use; and keep them ready in the event of war. A lot of this equipment came from military surplus. The CIA was also supposed to have some contacts [inside the USSR] worked out ahead of time for use when we got there, and that was also the job of the émigré groups on the agency payroll. In the meantime, they [the émigré troops] were useful for espionage or covert action." Both the army and the CIA laid claim to the authority to control guerrilla foot soldiers after war had actually been declared.

 A recently declassified top secret document confirms Prouty’s assertion that the émigré armies enjoyed an important role in the eyes of nuclear planners of the time. The 1949 study begins with a summary of what was then the current atomic strategy. Seventy atomic bombs, along with an unspecified amount of conventional explosives, were slated to be dropped from long-range planes on selected Soviet targets over a thirty-day period. The impact of the attack had to be carefully calculated, according to the JCS memo: about 40 percent of the Soviets’ industrial capacity would be destroyed, including most of the militarily crucial petroleum industry.  

But this, the chiefs  contended, would not guarantee victory. The thirty-day atomic assault, the Pentagon concluded with considerable understatement, “might stimulate resentment against the United States” among the people of the USSR, thus increasing their will to fight. A major program of political warfare following the attack was therefore essential, the JCS determined. In fact, the effectiveness of the atomic attack itself was “dependent upon adequacy and promptness of [the] associated military and psychological operations….Failing prompt and effective exploitation, the opportunity would be lost and subsequent Soviet psychological reactions would adversely affect the accomplishment of Allied objectives.”

The commitment of five wings of B-29 bombers to the émigré guerrilla army project is a practical measure of importance that the Pentagon attached to it. The B-29 was the largest, most sophisticated, and most expensive heavy bomber in the U.S. inventory at the time. According to Prouty, General Vandenberg originally conceived of the air force's role in psychological and guerrilla warfare as a third branch of his service, equal, at least in administrative status, to the Strategic Air Command and the Tactical Air Command. Special Forces visionaries in the army such as General McClure had similar plans for that service as well.

The Vlasov Army guerrilla training proposals earlier initiated by Keenan, Thayer, and Lindsay fitted neatly into the military's nuclear strike force plans..."

 

— END QUOTE.

 

Of course, one must come to the conclusion, after reading the former admissions by COL. Prouty, that he, under Gen. Vandenberg, helped recruit and reorganize thousands of Nazi émigré guerrillas for “Operation BLOODSTONE,” meshing those fascist stay-behind commandos into the newly formed “Special Forces” of US Army Gen. Robert Alexis McClure (of course, it was Gen. McClure who served as commander of Military Assistance Advisory Group, Iran during the 15 August 1953 Iranian coup d'état, code-named Operation AJAX).

 

Nazi émigré forces that were previously under the command of SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny:

 

• https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/SKORZENY%2C OTTO VOL. 1_0029.pdf

 

 

 

The above United States Army intelligence document, created from an *interrogation report from the US Army 307th Counterintelligence Corp's own debriefing of Otto Skorzeny literally identifies Skorzeny as, "...Chief of AMT VI/S..." and "...Section Chief of MILITARRISCHES AMT D..."

*It should be noted that two of the debriefing officers that interrogated Skorzeny were Arnold Melvin Silver, CIA commander of Project "QJWIN" criminal spotter program and US Army Brig. Gen. Theodore C. Mataxis, Chief of Personal Staff, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs—of course, Arnold Silver's liaison to the CIA's assassination capabilities, AKA Executive Action, was William King Harvey—in November of 1963, Bill Harvey was the CIA Station Chief in Rome, Italy, where his State Department attaché to the Vatican was Carmel Offie.

Carmel Offie was the Office of Policy Coordination commander of Operation BLOODSTONE, and by 1963, while working under Bill Harvey, Offie was attaché to Pope Paul VI.

Pope Paul VI, AKA Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini, had served, in 1952, under the Secretariat of State of the Holy See, as the Deputy of Foreign Affairs of the Vatican, and secretly met with Otto Skorzeny to finance a commando army in Spain...

 

...I digress once more...

 

Amt VI-S was the Nazi High Command's special forces émigré armies—which fell under the Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS (Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS) Foreign Security Service, or, as it was known in German, Ausland-SD.

Of course, Skorzeny's other title states he was commander of the Nazi German Military Section D, or Militarrisches Amt-D.

Militarrisches Amt-D was the Nazi intelligence section tasked with infiltration operations against United States military intelligence.

This means that Skorzeny was commander of all Ausland-SD operations tasked with infiltration of US intelligence services, and compromising their effectiveness! 

And if Skorzeny really was the commanding officer, of a special team, targeting President Kennedy for assassination, he certainly had all of his old Amt VI-S commandos in well placed positions within the command structure of United States Army Special Forces Command—thanks to COL. Prouty and his Operation BLOODSTONE war plan!

Dedicated researcher Leslie Sharp has pointed out the disturbing entries within the Jean-Pierre Lafitte datebook that indicate Skorzeny was mastermind behind the Kennedy murder plot.

I would like to note that one of the names mentioned in the Lafitte datebook appears to be Operation MONGOOSE officer and Chief of Staff of the United States Army, Gen. George Henry Decker.

In keeping with the theorem that COL. Prouty grafted SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny's émigré armies to United States Army Special Forces, I'd like to note that the creator of the following special forces units was Gen. Decker: 

Special Action Force, Asia - 1st Special Forces Group on Okinawa

Special Action Force, Middle East - 3rd Special Forces Group

Special Action Force, Africa - 6th Special Forces Group in CONUS

Special Action Force, Latin America - 8th Special Forces Group in the Canal Zone

 

And the CIA support officers to those Special Forces units, operating under a CIA commando training program code-named ZRJEWEL were the following men:

Lt. Col. Lucien Emile Conein

William Alexander "Rip" Robertson Jr.

Grayston L. Lynch

Special Activities Division, Special Operations Group officers Lynch and Robertson were both commanders in Operation Zapata and Conein was in charge of overthrowing the South Vietnamese government.

Whether anyone will agree with me or not, I believe COL. Prouty may have known a helluva lot more than he revealed, and took valuable information concerning the real murderers of President Kennedy to the grave...  

 

 

Edited July 18, 2023 by Robert Montenegro

[Jeff Carter]

21 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

Jeff - I respect your contributions here, as you know. One question I have for you is whether you think ‘we’ doesn’t refer to himself and his superior officer. Maybe you are right that it’s generic. And then again maybe not. The other, more important question, is whether you think it’s worth examining the documents pertaining to Bloodstone? Are you of the ‘no big deal’ camp when it comes to the incorporation of Nazi soldiers and intelligence operatives into US special forces? Leave Prouty out for a second, as I asked others to do. Do you think the US military was involved, as Prouty himself later asserted? 

Paul, I have followed the “Nazi Connection to the JFKA” since the 1990s. Simpson’s book was published in 1988. Carl Oglesby wrote about Gehlen in “The Yankee and the Cowboy War” in the mid-70s. The U.S. gov’t denied its relationship with Gehlen up through the year 2000.  I couldn’t begin to understand anyone who might belong to a “no big deal camp”.  The distributed presence of exfiltrated Nazi war criminals had severe well documented consequences within Latin America and NATO, to name two places. David Emory has been expanding knowledge of the networks for a very long time.No doubt there is much more to be learned.

Fletcher Prouty witnessed first hand an exfiltration operation moving German personnel out of Roumania and away from the advancing Soviets. He was under the impression it was an OSS operation, orchestrated by Wisner. There’s a clue. Prouty’s superior in the Air Transport Command Col. RJ Smith set up that particular event logistically. That is, maybe, another clue. But what we have here is an entire thread speculating that it was Prouty - the enlisted man following orders - who was running the entire operation!

Robert’s “proof” that Prouty worked under Vanderburg and was instrumental with Operation Bloodstone in 1947-48 is lacking, to say the least, and does not amount to much more than a misinterpretation of a pronoun. From that weak foundation he has offered sweeping generalizations and broad surmises which are not grounded in or even suggested by the material record, let alone the two primary sources he claims. The material record shows Prouty in academic pursuits through the late 1940s, as appears in his military records and as he discusses in fair detail in Understanding Special Operations.

This thread has followed a months long run of reputational disparagement directed at Prouty on this Forum, most of which sources to decades-old “hatchet jobs”. I am finishing up a detailed rebuttal, to be published soon at another site.

[Pete Mellor]

2 hours ago, Robert Montenegro said:

The mysterious "Jerry" Droller was later replaced by E. Howard Hunt as the CIA political action officer in-charge of the anti-Castro émigré effort...

 

...But I digress... 

Digress some more Robert.

I am led to believe that the mysterious aka Jerry Droller was originally one Friedrich Schwend.

Do you have any links between Herr Schwend and James Angleton back in '44/'45 when Angleton was head of X2?

[Paul Brancato]

2 hours ago, Jeff Carter said:

Paul, I have followed the “Nazi Connection to the JFKA” since the 1990s. Simpson’s book was published in 1988. Carl Oglesby wrote about Gehlen in “The Yankee and the Cowboy War” in the mid-70s. The U.S. gov’t denied its relationship with Gehlen up through the year 2000.  I couldn’t begin to understand anyone who might belong to a “no big deal camp”.  The distributed presence of exfiltrated Nazi war criminals had severe well documented consequences within Latin America and NATO, to name two places. David Emory has been expanding knowledge of the networks for a very long time.No doubt there is much more to be learned.

Fletcher Prouty witnessed first hand an exfiltration operation moving German personnel out of Roumania and away from the advancing Soviets. He was under the impression it was an OSS operation, orchestrated by Wisner. There’s a clue. Prouty’s superior in the Air Transport Command Col. RJ Smith set up that particular event logistically. That is, maybe, another clue. But what we have here is an entire thread speculating that it was Prouty - the enlisted man following orders - who was running the entire operation!

Robert’s “proof” that Prouty worked under Vanderburg and was instrumental with Operation Bloodstone in 1947-48 is lacking, to say the least, and does not amount to much more than a misinterpretation of a pronoun. From that weak foundation he has offered sweeping generalizations and broad surmises which are not grounded in or even suggested by the material record, let alone the two primary sources he claims. The material record shows Prouty in academic pursuits through the late 1940s, as appears in his military records and as he discusses in fair detail in Understanding Special Operations.

This thread has followed a months long run of reputational disparagement directed at Prouty on this Forum, most of which sources to decades-old “hatchet jobs”. I am finishing up a detailed rebuttal, to be published soon at another site.

Robert is not part of the get Prouty movement. He was simply pointing out his quotes, and his official capacity. In your interpretation of the quotes in Blowback, Prouty was just giving Simpson a history lesson. In Robert’s he is recounting operations that he was involved in first hand. Clearly he had superior officers, so you are overstating what Robert meant. You are stating that other than one Roumanian operation, or was it Syrian, he was back home in an academic post. Am I correct? Are you saying that Robert is mistaken about Prouty’s official title during Operation Bloodstone? 

[James DiEugenio]

14 hours ago, Robert Montenegro said:

 

Good Lord Jim:

Between 1955 and 1964, COL. Leroy Fletcher Prouty was the commander of all of the Central Intelligence Agency's military focal point support networks for covert operations!

Where will all of your deflections end?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is this supposed to be something new?

And this is what you use to dodge the fact that you are using two CIA assets who deliberately tried to smear Garrison and feed disinfo into CIA channels about him?

I went ahead and read the Simpson pages, which are actually 139-40.  The way you characterize this exchange is I think misleading. He does not speak about them as if he was a part of them.  He is giving Simpson information that he knew about.  And then if you read the footnotes, Simpson then went and found military documents on the subject   

Please Bob.

 

Edited July 18, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Paul Brancato]

5 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

Is this supposed to be something new?

And this is what you use to dodge the fact that you are using two CIA assets who deliberately tried to smear Garrison and feed disinfo about him?

Please Bob.

 

 Which CIA assets is Bob using? Does his info on Bloodstone depend on them? Is he also using primary documents? And for many, Prouty’s pre assassination career isn’t old news. I’ve never really thought about it. Those job titles put him at the center of covert policy no? Do you think Bob is misstating Prouty’s bio? I would also repeat something others have said - have you given Otto Skorzeny enough of a deep dive? We need you Jim, especially you, to take this seriously. I understand your objection to Griffith’s enumeration of Prouty’s supposed sins during retirement. I’ll look forward to reading Jeff’s essay, and have read the ones on your website too. I confess I’m confused - I don’t know who the real Prouty was. So I read and ponder. What I’m hoping you will do going forward is to put your acumen on solving the assassinations. 

[James DiEugenio]

Paul, 

Please.  Bob just used a CIA document quoting DePino and Bringuier to somehow say that Garrison was onto this German count.  You read it Paul.  To rely on that kind of sourcing for information shows either an incredible amount of ignorance about New Orleans, or a win at any cost agenda.

Jeff has the story about what Fletcher was doing at the time.  And he will produce it.

The idea that everything that Fletcher knew or wrote about was through his  direct experience is I think wrong. Since Fletcher was in the Pentagon then he knew a lot of people who worked in the military and this is where he got some of his information.  Since he interacted at times with the CIA in a support role for certain equipment, then he knew about some of their doings.  But this was at a different time frame.

Prouty came away from his experience at that position with a very strong dislike of the CIA.  And anyone can see that by reading his books.  And I think this is a main reason why he suspected they were involved with the JFK hit from the beginning. Many people are still puzzled as to where that picture came from down under.

 

[Jeff Carter]

1 hour ago, Paul Brancato said:

Robert is not part of the get Prouty movement. He was simply pointing out his quotes, and his official capacity. In your interpretation of the quotes in Blowback, Prouty was just giving Simpson a history lesson. In Robert’s he is recounting operations that he was involved in first hand. Clearly he had superior officers, so you are overstating what Robert meant. You are stating that other than one Roumanian operation, or was it Syrian, he was back home in an academic post. Am I correct? Are you saying that Robert is mistaken about Prouty’s official title during Operation Bloodstone? 

Yes. Robert is mistaken about Prouty and Operation Bloodstone. The error, in part, originates with Simpson, who incorrectly describes Prouty as “a senior aide to the airforce chief of staff in the 1940s”, which may indicate some confusion with his actual duties with the Air Transport Command. Note, though, Simpson does not say Prouty was “senior aide” specifically to Vanderburg and he says “1940s” rather than specifically 1947 or 1948 when the programs in question began. If Simpson knew of a direct correlation between Prouty and Vanderburg it would have been specified within the paragraph under discussion here.

The other quote - from the Ratcliffe interview - refers to information in Simpson’s book, which obviously impressed Prouty as he was not aware of the extent of the programs. Prouty uses “we” in reference to that information i.e. “we” the United States. He wouldn’t need to refer to specific information in the Simpson book if he was discussing programs he himself was responsible for.

 

I am not overstating what Robert meant. Robert has made the following direct claims (emphasis added):

Prouty said he created “a network of Nazi commandos and assassins”

Prouty admitted to being “ a driving force behind creation of the United States Army’s “Special Forces” units”

Prouty “was front-and-center in the utilization of Nazi émigrés within US Army Special Forces”

 

Prouty was doing academic work at Yale and in New York City from 1946 to the beginning of 1951, as he discusses in Understanding Special Operations. He also details the mission to Syria in 1944 in the same volume.

[Robert Montenegro]

1 hour ago, Jeff Carter said:

The error, in part, originates with Simpson, who incorrectly describes Prouty as “a senior aide to the airforce chief of staff in the 1940s”, which may indicate some confusion with his actual duties with the Air Transport Command.

Simpson states "...in the late 1940's..."

That's post WWII.

WWII ended officially in 1945.

Of course if the fault is with Simpson, why didn't COL. Prouty correct him?

[Paul Brancato]

Jeff - for a moment leaving out Bloodstone, what was Prouty doing from say 1954 to 1962? Weren’t there like 10 CIA military overthrows of elected governments during those years? Wasn’t he running covert ops for the Pentagon, or something like that? I don’t feel up to looking at past posts to determine his official title, but it seems to me he was part of that nexus. 

[W. Niederhut]

38 minutes ago, Paul Brancato said:

Jeff - for a moment leaving out Bloodstone, what was Prouty doing from say 1954 to 1962? Weren’t there like 10 CIA military overthrows of elected governments during those years? Wasn’t he running covert ops for the Pentagon, or something like that? I don’t feel up to looking at past posts to determine his official title, but it seems to me he was part of that nexus. 

Paul,

     Prouty was in Colorado Springs for a few years after he left Yale in 1949, then in Japan from 1952-54, and at USAF Headquarters from 1954-December of 1963.  He was always a USAF guy, and never reported to Allen Dulles-- on "the Secret Team."

     I just re-posted Greg Burnham's summary of Prouty's career history on the thread, "Why Prouty's Critics Are Wrong."

Edited July 19, 2023 by W. Niederhut