Haig in '63

NATO SACEUR Alexander M. Haig Jr. Inspects his (German) Troops

Prouty:     . . . Millions and millions of dollars were poured into that exercise -- a lot of people were involved in it -- and it never went through any Air Force procurement. Now, the cleared individual -- the man in the team -- in the procurement offices, made papers that covered up this gap. 

There were papers in the files but they had never been worked on -- they were simple dummy papers in the files. 

Now, we could do things like that with no trouble at all. The U2 was started like that. That's how the U2 got off the ground. Ostensibly, purchased by the Air Force, but not paid for by the Air Force, and so on. 

      So, when I say that this team was quite effective, it was very effective, very strong, handled a lot of money, worked all over the world, thousands of people were involved. I know, one time, when I was speaking to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at that time General Lemnitzer, he said, "You know, I've known of two or three units in the Army that were supporting CIA. But you're talking about quite a few. How many were there?" 

Well, at that time, there were 605. Well General Lemnitzer had no idea. It's amazing -- here's the top man in the military and he had no idea that we were supporting that many CIA units. Not military units -- they were phoney military units. They were operating with military people but they were controlled entirely, they were financed by the CIA. Six hundred and five of them. And I'm sure that from my day it increased; I know it didn't decrease. 

      So, people don't understand the size and the nature of this clandestine activity that is designed for clandestine operations all over the world. And it goes back, again, to things we've spoken of earlier, that that activity must be under somebody's control. There is no law for the control of covert operations other than at the National Security Council level. And if the National Security Council does not sign the directives, issue the directives, for covert operations, then nobody does. And that's when it becomes a shambles as we saw in the Contra affair and in other things. But when the National Security Council steps in and directs it and holds that control, then things are run properly. And we've seen that during the last decade there's been quite a few aberrations where they were talking about Iran or Latin America or even part of the Vietnam War itself. In fact, it was in the Vietnam War where the thing really began to come apart -- it just outgrew itself and the leadership role disintegrated. And we see the worst of it in the Iran-Contra affair.

Ratcliffe:   Following on that you write about Dulles being able to "move them up and deeper into their cover jobs" -- would this be a function of them being there longer than the people who would be promoted to something else in time?

Prouty:   Yes. When we put them in, they might be somebody's assistant. And they've been there for three years and the man that was above them, who was probably a political appointee, leaves and they might move this man up there. Or when a newer political appointee comes, he has no knowledge that this man is really from CIA. He's just a strong person in his office and he gives him a broader role. Sometimes these people (chuckling) were working -- well, one man I know was in FAA and we needed his work to help us with FAA as a focal point there. He'd been there so long the FEA had him in a very big, very responsible job, and you might say 90% of his work was regular FAA work. A very strong individual. Well, that meant that when we needed him to help us with some of our activities on the covert side of things, he was in a much better position to handle this than he had been originally. 
      

This happened with quite a few of them. That's why I say in the case of Frank Hand, he had been in the Defense Department so long that he was able to handle really major operations that weren't even visualized at the time he was assigned. All this carries over into many other things. I pointed out that the Office of Special Operations under General Erskine had the responsibility for the National Security Agency as well as CIA contacts and the State Department, and so on. Well, as we filled up these positions, some of them became dominant in some those organizations, such as NSA. 
      

Early people in this program have created quite a career for themselves in other work. For instance, a young man in this system was Major Haig. Major Al Haig. 

He went up through the system. He was working as a deputy to the Army's cleared Focal Point Officer for Agency support matters who was the General Counsel in the Army, a man named Joe Califano -- a very prominent lawyer today. When the General Counsel of the Army was moved up into the office of Secretary of Defense later -- in McNamara's office -- he carried with him this then-Lieutenant Colonel Al Haig up to the office of Secretary of Defense. 

And during the Johnson Administration when they moved to the White House, Califano and Haig moved to the White House. 

Then during the Nixon time, Haig with all his experience in the White House worked with Kissinger. 

And you can see that it was this attachment through the covert side which gave Haig his ability to do an awful lot of things that people didn't understand, because he had this whole team behind him. To be even more up-to-date, there was a Major Secord in our system. And Major Secord is the same General Secord you've been reading about in the Iran-Contra business. 

A lot of these people worked right up into the White House. And there were these same assigned people even at the White House level that really were working on this CIA covert work rather than the jobs that they seemed to hold, that the public understood was the job that they were working for. It's a much more effective system than people have thought it was. . . .