JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  Colonel Prouty thus sets the stage for Dallas in all its horror. He explains the true inner myth of our most staged public execution, the “Reichstag Fire” of our era, behind whose proscenium, blinded by the light of surface-event television, the power of the throne was stolen and exchanged by bloody hands. He shows us that Kennedy was removed, fundamentally, because he threatened the “System” far too dangerously. Colonel Prouty shows us the Oswald cover story and how it has successfully to this day, my movie notwithstanding, blinded the American public to the truth of its own history—which requires, I suppose, a degree of outrage at our government and media and an urgency to replace it for the abuse of our rights as outlined in the Constitution and in the Declaration of Independence (“that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of . . . [Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government . . . it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government and to provide new Guards for their future Security”) but which too few of us have the energy for (except maybe the young, whom ultimately Colonel Prouty is addressing).

  It is Colonel Prouty—with his background both as military officer and international banker—who shows us concisely that Kennedy was removed not only for his skittish policy on Vietnam and Cuba but because he fundamentally was affecting the economic might of this nation-planet, U.S.A., Inc., and its New World Order. Kennedy undermined, as Prouty fascinatingly outlines, not only the Federal Reserve Board but the CIA and its thousand-headed Medusa of an economic system (CIA: “Capitalism’s Invisible Army”), but most dangerously and most expensively (ultimately some $6 trillion in Cold War money) the world-around economic lines of the “High Cabal” and its military-industrial complex so ominously forecast by Eisenhower in his farewell address. In bringing back the ghost of Buckminster Fuller and his great book, The Critical Path, Colonel Prouty shows us what we must understand of world history—he probes beneath the Egyptian mast of events and scenery and thousands of Cecil B. De Mille extras—to the very core of history—the Phoenician sail lines, the industrial complex, the distribution of minerals and oil, the exploitation of the planet and why, and who benefits. These are the key questions of our times—controlling the way you think, the way the media tells you to think, and the way you must think if we are to resist the ultimate desecration of the planet at the hands of U.S.A. , Inc. , and its New World Order. Environment must be reversed. U.S.A., Inc., must—and can—be reversed with new leadership. Read as companion pieces to Colonel Prouty the unofficial “histories” of Buckminster Fuller in The Critical Path and Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, to fully understand the scope of the “octopus” we are in mortal combat with. Churchill, many years ago, called it overtly “The High Cabal.” I am not sure, after all these years, that Mr. Churchill was being too dramatic.

  Ultimately we must ask who owns America? Who owns reality? This book reads like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall; we see inside the wheel of our history how our various “emperors” come and go and their relationship to the military machine. Who owns our “history?” He who makes it up so that most everyone believes it. That person wins—as George Orwell so lucidly pointed out in 1984. If Mr. Hitler had won the Second World War, the version of events now given to us (invasions of Third World lower slave races for mineral-resource conquest and world-round economic-military power) would not be too far off the mark. But instead of Nazi jackboots, we have men in gray suits and ties with attaché cases—“Lawyer Capitalism,” Buckminster Fuller labeled it. Whatever its name, or uniform—beware.

  I thank Colonel Prouty, who is old now, in his seventies—on the verge of going to the other side. Yet he has paused (“How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use!” as Tennyson once said) and mustered his final energy and a lifetime’s lucidity, and knowing full well the onslaught against his ideas and person that will come from the usual suspects, has once more ventured into the arena with the lions who kill and maim at the very least—and given us his truth at far greater personal expense than the reader of his volume will ever know. I salute you, Colonel Prouty—both as friend and warrier. “Fare thee well, Roman soldier.”

  May 1992

  Stone Discusses His Film JFK

  and Introduces the Real “Man X”

  On the Friday before Christmas, in 1991, Oliver Stone’s epic film JFK opened in Washington. Shown in a theater on Capitol Hill for all members of Congress, their families and staffs, and for other invited guests, this movie with its stark portrayal of the death of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, has shocked the moviegoing public around the world. As the president of the National Press Club said a month later, when introducing Oliver Stone: “JFK may go down as the most talked about movie of the decade.”

  That movie was built upon the symbiotic relationship between the courtroom strategy of the Garrison “conspiracy” trial in New Orleans, the classic “anti—Warren Commission” lore of Jim Marrs’s “Crossfire” narrative based upon the Dallas scene, and the electric shock treatment of the “Man X” question “Why?” and its stark analysis of the “power elite” of Washington’s military-industrial arena.

  The movie speaks to all people, and its tragic “Crime of the Century” story has had a global impact, and the dust has yet to settle. Its message lives. The response to that stark “Why?” is “President Kennedy was assassinated as a result of a decision made . . . from within the military-industrial complex of power . . . at a level above the U.S. government to preserve the benefits (to them) of the war in Vietnam by denying his reelection in 1964.” That answer was derived from the facts and content of this book.

  As Stone has said so frequently, “Had President Kennedy lived, Americans would not have become deeply involved in the Vietnam War.” Because of the enormous dollar potential of the war to the great military-industrial complex of the United States and because of other threats to the power elite, it had become absolutely necessary, for them, to bring about this coup d’état on the streets of Dallas. This book in its original form provided vital parts of the movie’s theme. In the final analysis, both the movie and book prove beyond all doubt that the government’s Warren Commission Report on the Assassination of President Kennedy was contrived and is false; and that the government used the Warren Commission to cover up the facts of the crime with a diversionary story.

  As a result of the opening of this movie and amid the uproar that was sweeping across the country, the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., invited Oliver Stone to speak before its members and a nationwide audience on C-Span television. Stone appeared on January 15, 1992, before a packed auditorium. Katherine Kahler, president of the National Press Club, asked Oliver Stone to clarify a major and frequently asked question: “Does the Deep Throat—Man X character played by Donald Sutherland really exist?”

  Stone responded: “I’m very glad this is asked, because so many people have asked me, when they came out of the movie, ‘Who is Man X?’ Let me just say that Man X exists. He’s here today on the podium. He is Fletcher Prouty. He served in the military since before World War II. From 1955 to 1964 he was in the Pentagon working as chief of special operations and in that capacity was with the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy years. He was responsible for providing the military support of the clandestine operations of the CIA . . . that is, ‘Black Operations.’”

  Oliver Stone had visited Fletcher Prouty in Washington in July 1990 and asked about his work in the Pentagon, especially during the Kennedy years, 1961—63. Stone added, “I understood his own shock and disbelief at what happened to the President and what happened in the years that followed . . . here and in Vietnam.

  “Col. Prouty had never met with Jim Garrison, but over the years he had written many letters to him and had worked on Jim’s manuscript before its publication. They were well acquainted, by letters. I took the liberty of having a meeting
take place between Mr. Garrison and Colonel Prouty because Jim Garrison had brought Prouty’s work to my attention. Some people have misunderstood and claimed that Man X never existed and that I made him up. I never did. That information in the movie came from Fletcher.”

  In summary, Oliver Stone added: “I think Fletcher has served his country well and retired as a full colonel. He’s written a book called The Secret Team. He has been critical of the CIA’s illegitimate activities in the fifties and sixties. He knows a lot about it—he briefed people like Allen Dulles, knew them, knew General Charles Cabell, knew the atmosphere in the Pentagon and the CIA at the time, knew General Lansdale. He retired in 1964 from the Pentagon and became a banker.”

  Because “Man X” is Fletcher Prouty, the author of this book, the reader will find much more to support what caught the eye of Oliver Stone, among others. As an introductory comment on both his movie JFK and this book, Oliver Stone delivered the following speech before the Press Club:

  I have been accused by a number of people, some of them journalists, of a distortion of history If there is any common thread of attack running through those claims of those critics of JFK, it is a notion that somehow there is an accepted, settled, respected, carefully thought out and researched body of history about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. All of which I have set out deliberately to subvert, using as my weapon the motion picture medium and taking as my target the impressionable young, who will believe anything as long as it is visual. This distortion of history has come at me from all quarters, although almost entirely, it must be said, from people old enough to know better. And it ignores, deliberately and carefully, the fact that there is no accepted history of these events; and that these terrible times remain the most undocumented, unresearched, unagreed-upon nonhistorical period of our history.

  One can read in history books the standard two paragraphs that John F. Kennedy was shot by a lone gunman, who in turn was killed by another earnest vigilante and lone gunman. End of story. But that theory, put forward in twenty-six unindexed volumes by the Warren Commission, from the day it was issued was never even believed by a majority of Americans. The number of people who disbelieve it increases each year. Are we really to believe:

  1. That settled, agreed, sanctified history includes, that Lee Harvey Oswald wrote away, under an easy-to-trade alias, for an inaccurate mail-order Italian rifle, called by the Italian army the humanitarian rifle, because it never killed anyone when deliberately aimed... when he could have anonymously bought an accurate weapon at any street corner in Dallas?

  2. Is it sacred history that this semiliterate high school dropout from Ft. Worth, Texas, professing Marxism, was taken to a secret, highly trained marine unit at an air base where the U-2 spy plane flights originated in Japan; given courses in the Russian language; and then permitted to leave the Marine Corps on three days’ notice on a trumped-up claim of illness of his mother, who days after his death was the first to make the claim her son was working for American Intelligence?

  3. Is it settled history that he then defected to the Soviet Union with a request for travel that included a reference to an obscure Ph. D.’s only graduate institute in Switzerland?

  4. Are we to believe it is now history, not to be disturbed except by people like me, that he then went to the United States embassy in Moscow, announced his intention to defect and to turn over U.S. secrets to the Russians, and was permitted to go his way?

  5. Is is part of our history which cannot be touched that he then returned eighteen months later to the same U.S. embassy announcing his intention to resume American citizenship and was handed his passport and some funds to enable him to return home?

  6. Must one be a disturber of the peace to question the history that says he was met by a CIA front representative when he returned to the United States and that he was never debriefed by an intelligence organization, although 25,000 tourists, that year, were so debriefed?

  7. Must one be a distorter of history to question why he then merged into the fiercely anti-Communist, White Russian community of Dallas, although he kept up the absurd front of Marxism; or the equally rabid anti-Communist circle of Guy Bannister in New Orleans?

  8. Or how did Oswald just come to have the job a few weeks before, at the Book Depository, overlooking the precise point in the motorcade where Kennedy’s car took that unusual eleven-mile-an-hour curve?

  9. Or how Oswald came to be spotted by patrolman Marion Baker only ninety seconds after the sixth-floor shooting, on the second floor having a Coca-Cola and showing no signs of being out of breath?

  10. Or the too-neat stashing of the rifle without hand prints?

  11. And the three cartridges laid out side by side at the window?

  12. Or Oswald’s cool and calm behavior that weekend, or his claim, the statement, that he was a patsy?

  Am I a disturber of history to question why Allen Dulles, who had been fired by JFK from the CIA, which JFK had said he would splinter into a thousand pieces, was appointed to the Warren Commission to investigate Mr. Kennedy’s murder? And so on, and so on, and so on.

  To accept this settled version of history, which must not be disturbed, was to then call down the venom of leading journalists from around the country. One must also believe the truly absurd, single-bullet theory of the Warren Commission, which holds that one bullet caused seven wounds in Kennedy and Governor Connally, breaking two dense bones and coming out clean, no metal missing, no blood tissue or anything on it. Its path, as you know, utterly ludicrous, entering Kennedy’s back on a downward trajectory, changing direction, exiting up through his throat, pausing for 1.6 seconds before deciding to attack Connally, then turning right, then left, then right again, hitting Connally at the back of his right armpit, heading downward through his chest, taking a right turn at Connally’s wrist, shattering the radius bone, exiting his wrist; the bullet launches one last assault, taking a dramatic U-turn and burying itself in Connally’s left thigh. Later, that bullet turns up five miles from the scene of the crime on a stretcher, in a corridor at Parkland Hospital in pristine condition.

  No, ladies and gentlemen, this is not history! This is myth! It is myth that a scant number of Americans have ever believed. It is a myth that an esteemed generation of journalists and historians have refused to examine, have refused to question, and above all, have closed ranks to criticize and vilify those who do. So long as the attackers of that comforting “lone gunman” theory could be dismissed as “kooks” and “cranks” and the writers of obscure books that would not be published by “reputable publishing houses,” not much defense was needed. But now all that is under attack by a well-financed and, I hope, a well-made motion picture with all the vivid imagery and new energy the screen can convey. Now, either enormous amounts of evidence have to be marshaled in support of that myth or else those in question must be attacked. Those that question it must be attacked. There is no evidence; so, therefore, the attack is on.

  Some journalists of the sixties are self-appointed keepers of the flame. They talk about “our history” and fight savagely those who would question it. But, confronted with the crime of the century, with no motive and hardly any alleged perpetrators, they stand here. Where, in the last twenty years, have we seen serious research from Tom Wicker, Dan Rather, Anthony Lewis, George Lardner, Ken Auchincloss, into Lee Harvy Oswald’s movements in the months and years before 22 November 1963? Where have we seen any analysis of why Oswald, who, many say, adored Kennedy, alone among assassins in history would not only deny his guilt but would claim he was a “patsy”? Can one imagine John Wilkes Booth leaping tothe stage at Ford’s Theater, turning to the audience and shouting, “I didn’t kill anyone—I’m just a patsy”?

  One might ask of the journalists who have suddenly emerged as the defenders of history, What is their sense of history? How much work has the “Sage of Bethesda,” George Will, done in the twenty years he has been a columnist to try to uncover the answers to those dark secrets in Dallas 1963? Wil
l Tom Wicker and Dan Rather spend their retirement years examining, closer, the possibility of a second or third gunman; or will they content themselves with savaging those who do? Why is no one questioning Richard Helms, who lied to the Warren Commission, when we know, now, that there was, as of 1960, an increasingly thick “201” file on LHO? Why is no one questioning Mr. Hoover—Hoover’s memo of 1961—outlining the fact that someone was using Oswald’s name, while Oswald was in Russia, to buy trucks for the Guy Bannister apparatus in New Orleans? Why are none of the reporters questioning Colonel Fletcher Prouty, in depth, or Marina Oswald Porter, who says her husband was working for something bigger; or questioning the alleged hit man, Charles Harrelson, who is in maximum security? Let them deny what they will, but at least ask them!