The valuable Fletcher Prouty finally has his biographical film. And its also autobiographical; since a good part of it is made up of various interviews with him.
Prouty was a military man who interfaced with the CIA for years on end, sometimes speaking directly to Allen Dulles. After graduating from University of Massachusetts Amherst he began his military career with the 4th Armored Division in Pine Camp, New York. In 1942 he was transferred to the Army Air Force and became a pilot. He began service in World War II in 1943 in British West Africa. He served as personal pilot to, among others, General Omar Bradley. In October of 1943 he flew a geological survey team into Saudi Arabia to confirm oil deposits for the upcoming Cairo Conference. He later flew Chiang Kai Shek’s Chinese delegation to Tehran.
Promoted to captain, he was shifted to the Far East in 1945 and ended up being on Okinawa at war’s end. When the peace treaty was signed in Tokyo Harbor Prouty flew in Douglas MacArthur’s phalanx of bodyguards and he later shipped out American POWs. All in all, it was a distinguished war record.
Afterwards Prouty was assigned by the army to start up an ROTC program at Yale. This is where he meet William F. Buckley and he later said he wrote some things for Buckley’s Yale paper. In 1950 he was sent to Colorado Springs to build the Air Defense Command. The mission of this branch was air defense of the Continental United States or CONUS. During the Korean War he served as manager of the Tokyo International Airport during the American occupation.
In 1955 he began service at the position that would later make him stellar in studies of the John F. Kennedy assassination. This was as a coordinator for military supplies between the Air Force and the CIA. Which roughly meant that if a CIA covert operation needed an air aspect, Prouty would be the man to consult. His work was so distinguished here that he was promoted to Colonel and became the focal point officer for the Defense Department with the same duties. He retired in 1964 and was awarded a Joint Service Medal by Max Taylor, Chair of the Joint Chiefs. After retirement he worked in banking and the railroad industry.
But there was a third area Prouty was involved in after he retired from his long stay in the service. And that was the writing of books and articles. Since he did not sign a non-disclosure agreement, unlike others, Prouty did not have to clear in advance what he wrote about his career, his assignments or his knowledge of certain affairs. Therefore, he was one of the first to disclose secret information about men like James McCord and Alexander Butterfield, both involved in the Watergate scandal. The former was not just a technician, and the latter—as Prouty learned from Howard Hunt-- was a CIA contact in the Nixon White House.
Jeff Carter has now made a film about the fascinating life and career of this unique character. The first part of Fletcher Prouty’s Cold War deals largely with the man’s military background. And Carter goes into much more expansive detail than what I have sketched above. But beyond that the film handles all of this information with skill and agility. Carter did an admirable job in finding back up pictures and films to fill in the foreground and background of some very important points in Prouty’s career that happen to intersect with modern history. For instance, while at Okinawa, Prouty saw literally tons of equipment being landed and warehoused for a possible invasion of mainland Japan. But since Japan surrendered before any such invasion, these arms were transferred to Indochina since Ho Chi Minh had been resisting Japan in the August Revolution.
There are also valuable insights about how Allen Dulles started the Cold war with his part in Operation Paper Clip. This was the transference of top grade Nazi scientists from Germany to the USA to play a role in designing modern weaponry against Russia. That agreement, of course, was accompanied by General Walter B. Smith with a parallel agreement. This one made between the OSS and Reinhard Gehlen to have the former Nazi spy chief take his information about the Russians from Germany’s eastern front to Washington DC. This was quite natural for the Dulles brothers—Allen and John Foster--since their law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, was active in business dealings in Germany until 1939. Therefore between the brothers and John McCloy, High Commissioner for Germany, the decision was made to go easy on the former Nazi regime in order to ramp up for our new enemy, Russia.
The film deals with another subject that was relatively ignored until Prouty repeatedly pointed out its importance. This was the Dulles-Jackson-Correa Report. That 1949 document was 193 pages long and was critical of what the CIA had done so far and also the performance of the Director, Roscoe Hillenkoetter. That report stated the CIA was not coordinated to meet national security interests, did not supply accurate National Intelligence Estimates often enough, and did not have a single office yet for covert and clandestine operations.
The ultimate impact of this report was that Hillenkoetter resigned over his failure to predict the invasion of South Korea, and Walter B. Smith became the new DCI. One of the authors of the report, William Harding Jackson, became Smith’s deputy. And Smith and Jackson implemented that report into the Agency. Thus the CIA now became more of a covert action rather than an intelligence gathering group. And when Dulles became Deputy DCI and then Director, this aspect fully flowered.
Prouty wrote a series of memorable articles for various publications in the seventies and eighties. These essays displayed an intimate knowledge of contemporary American history, characters , American conflicts in world affairs and just how the CIA worked, both abroad and domestically. For instance, he was one of the first to point out that the Agency had lists of cleared attorneys and doctors in major cities who could be called upon to cover up certain crimes the CIA committed. A document proving such was the case was later declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB, see The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 35)
Along with Peter Scott, Ken O’Donnell and Dave Powers, he was one of the first to argue—contrary to conventional wisdom—that President Johnson had seriously altered Kennedy’s policy in Vietnam. Fletcher Prouty was aware of this since he worked for General Victor Krulak. And Krulak was very closely involved with Vietnam policy in 1963. As time went on, Fletcher also became more and more interested in the assassinations of the sixties, especially the murder of President Kennedy. There was a now famous exchange of letters between Jim Garrison and Prouty over the former DA’s book, On the Trail of the Assassins. Prouty was appreciative of Garrison’s efforts. So as Jeff Carter’s film notes, when Oliver Stone talked to both Garrison and his editor, Zach Sklar—who became co-screenwriter of JFK—those two urged him to get in contact with Fletcher.
As Prouty notes in the film, only half-humorously, if he would have known what was about to happen to him, he would have run for the hills. To understand how this happened one needs to be reminded of the fact that the character of Mr. X, so memorably delineated by Donald Sutherland, was based on Prouty. And it was through that character that the film JFK exploded the myth that Johnson, after Kennedy’s assassination, had continued Kennedy’s policy in Vietnam.
That explosion, quite literally, was a shock to the system. In retrospect we can see that the entire establishment—the MSM, academia, Washington—had cooperated to, not just hide the facts, but to also marginalize the voices that had tried to reveal the truth about this epochal tragedy. And they had done this assiduously for close to thirty years. The combination of the film presenting the hidden record so dramatically and effectively, plus showing how Garrison was exposed to it at the time—which, as the ARRB proved, was also accurate—was just too much. Too many people were now shown to be utterly and completely wrong e. g. New YorkTimes journalists David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan. Plus, as the film suggested--because the policy reversal was so abrupt—it could have been the reason for Kennedy’s assassination. For as JFK demonstrated, the Warren Report was a false document. Lee Harvey Oswald had not killed President Kennedy.
Sutherland’s role as Mr. X in the film was a tour de force. And during the memorable walk he took in Washington with Garrison (Kevin Costner), the information that X conveyed about the overseas crimes of the CIA was all accurate information. And Prouty was there for much of it e.g. the secret war against Cuba.
But it was what Sutherland said about Vietnam that was so disturbing. One reason being that just four months after the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission were issued, the first combat troops landed in DaNang. An escalation that Kennedy would simply not countenance. (Lessons in Disaster, by Gordon Goldstein, p. 63) Further, the film took proper notice of NSAM 263. That October 1963 order was to begin Kennedy’s withdrawal plan in December, to be completed in 1965. Prouty knew about all this since, through his superior, Krulak, he worked on the withdrawal program. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, second edition, p. 408). As he says in the film, the actual Taylor/McNamara report was ready and waiting to be handed to the visiting delegation upon their return.
In other words, what Mr. X/Prouty, was saying in the film was this: if Kennedy had lived, 58, 000 Americans, 3.8 million Vietnamese, and 2 million Cambodians would not have perished. America would have been spared ten more years of civil strife and massive demonstrations. And the rebuilding of Vietnam would have begun much sooner. What Stone and Sklar were also saying was this: there had been a cover up about this colossal matter, and just about the entire establishment was complicit in it.
Because Prouty was the figure in the film that conveyed this rather powerful message, both the information, and the messenger were singled out for attack by the likes of George Lardner, Robert Sam Anson and Edward Epstein. (For my specific reply to Epstein, click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-abstract-reality-of-edward-epstein)
What these three journalists all had in common was that they had previously attacked Jim Garrison back in the sixties and seventies. They were not going to stand idly by while they were belatedly proven wrong. So they all attacked Stone’s film, which because of their proven bias, they should not have been allowed to do. In fact Lardner and Anson did so before the film was actually released. (See The Book of the Film, by Oliver Stone and Zack Sklar, pp. 191-98; 208-229) All three men either went after Prouty or disputed the information that Prouty (and historian John Newman) had supplied to director Oliver Stone about Vietnam.
But here is the ultimate irony. The declassifications of the ARRB proved beyond reasonable doubt that the film, and Prouty, were correct. In the documentary film, JFK Revisited, are displayed the records of the May 1963 Sec/Def conference. Those records were so compelling that even the New York Times had to admit that Kennedy was planning to get out of Vietnam at the time of his death. (See the book JFK Revisited, by James DiEugenio, p. 186) So, bottom line, this was all Sturm and Drang about Prouty to disguise the fundamental truth that he and Stone were correct about Kennedy’s withdrawal plan from Vietnam. (For more on what Anson tried to do to Prouty, click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/fletcher-prouty-vs-the-arrb)
The film deals with other controversial subjects which Prouty has special knowledge of, for example, the Suez Crisis of 1956, where Israel, France and England tried to dislodge Nasser as the leader of Egypt. In this episode, Fletcher concentrates on the duplicity of Foster Dulles and how he set up Anthony Eden to take the fall in the affair. His discussion of the U2 shootdown is also quite interesting since he thinks that Gary Powers’ flight was sabotaged. The motive being to sandbag the upcoming May 1960 Summit Meeting in Paris. Prouty also discusses how the Bay of Pigs mysteriously morphed from the time it was being planned by Richard Nixon and the CIA—then it was a guerilla action with 300 men—to the time Kennedy was inaugurated, where it was now training almost 3000 men. Prouty has always stressed the importance of the Taylor Commission afterwards, where Bobby Kennedy went after Allen Dulles tooth and nail. It was here that RFK began to suspect that the operation was never expected to succeed, and that its imminent failure would be used to coax JFK into using the Navy to intercede.
All in all, this is a worthy tribute to a worthy man. One who was unjustly smeared, even by those in the critical community. Jeff Carter has interweaved several interviews with Fletcher by people like John Judge, Dave Ratcliffe, Bruce Kainer, and Len Osanic for maximum informational effect. And there is a concluding interview with Oliver Stone which was done in Vancouver. Here the director gives Fletcher Prouty the praise he deserves for the solid and valuable information he contributed to his landmark film.
From which, the establishment never recovered.
The film may be watched here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/fletcherproutyscoldwar
