“ . . . 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 U-2 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--heres the top man in the military and he had no idea that we were supporting that many CIA units. Not military units--they were phony 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 theres 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. . . . Ratcliffe: You describe what seems to be a very enlightening day --an event in 1960 or 1961 when you briefed "the Chairman of the JCS on a matter that had come up involving the CIA and the military." [p.257] As you described it:
The chairman was General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, and his commandant was General David M. Shoup. They were close friends and had known each other for years. When the primary subject of the briefing had ended General Lemnitzer asked me about the Army cover unit that was involved in the operation. I explained what its role was and more or less added that this was a rather routine matter. Then he said, "Prouty, if this is routine, yet General Shoup and I have never heard of it before, can you tell me in round numbers how many Army units there are that exist as `cover` for the CIA?" I replied that to my knowledge at that time there were about 605 such units, some real, some mixed, and some that were simply telephone drops. When he heard that he turned to General Shoup and said, "You know, I realized that we provided cover for the Agency from time to time; but I never knew that we had anywhere near so many permanent cover units and that they existed all over the world."
I then asked General Lemnitzer if I might ask him a question. He said I could. "General", I said, "during all of my military career I have done one thing or another at the direction of a senior officer. In all those years and in all of those circumstances I have always believed that someone, either at the level of the officer who told me to do what I was doing or further up the chain of command, knew why I was doing what I had been directed to do and that he knew what the reason for doing it was. Now I am speaking to the senior military officer in the armed forces and I have just found out that some things I have been doing for years in support of the CIA have not been known and that they have been done, most likely, in response to other authority. Is this correct?"
This started a friendly, informal, and most enlightening conversation, more or less to the effect that where the CIA was concerned there were a lot of things no one seemed to know. [p.258]
Can you recount more of the details of this enlightening conversation for us?
Prouty: Well, you know I referred to it earlier. It astounded me, that day. I assumed that there were a lot things that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was not aware of every day in the Air Force, in the Navy, and in the CIA. But I had never expected such a blanket answer, that he didn't know, and that General Shoup didn't. Now, what we were talking about was rather specific. At the time of the rebellion in Indonesia when the CIA supported tens of thousands of troops with aircraft, and ships, submarines, and everything else, in an attempt to overthrow the government of Sukarno, we needed rifles pretty quick to support these rebels and I called out to Okinawa and found out that the Army didn't have enough rifles for what we wanted. We wanted about 42,000 rifles and they had about 28,000. But that he said he thought he could get--General Lemnitzer was a Commander at that time in Okinawa. So he was right up close to this thing. He said that he'd have somebody call the Marine Corps and see what he could get from them. Well, it just happened that General Shoup was the head of the Marine unit at Okinawa and he said, sure, he could provide the extra 14,000. So without delay, we had 4-engine aircraft--C-54's- -flown by Air America crews but under military cover--appeared to be military aircraft--come into Okinawa, pick up these 42,000 rifles, prepared for air drop in Indonesia. They'd fly down to the Philippines and then down to another base we had and then over into Indonesia and drop these rifles. Well of course, we replaced those rifles. The General didn't know where they were going, we just borrowed them, and the unit that borrowed them was military and the call had come from the Pentagon. There was no problem with supplying the rifles. So years later, we replaced them. Well then when I told him about that in the Pentagon, he said he never knew where those rifles went and General Shoup said, "you know, Lem, when you asked me for 14,000 rifles, I thought you wanted them and, of course, being a good Marine, I gave you 14,000 rifles." He said, "you owe me 14,000." They were sitting there kidding but they never knew they went to Indonesia. You see, they never knew they were part of a covert operation going into Indonesia. Well, this is true of a lot of things that go on. We kept the books in the Pentagon. We covered that. We got reimbursement for it. That part of it was all right. And that's what kept it from being a problem because as long as General Lemnitzer's forces got the 28,000 rifles back and Shoup got the 14,000 back for the total of 42,000, they didn't complain to anybody. They had their full strength of rifles. That's the magic of reimbursement. Well, his kind of thing, on an established basis--the units are there--when I said there are 605 units, those are operating units- -now, some of them may only be telephone drops, because that's their function, they don't need a whole lot of people, they're just handling supplies, or something like that. But put this in present terms. When Colonel North believed that he had been ordered to take 2,008 Toe missiles and deliver them to Iran--see?--there has to be some way that the supply system can let those go. You can't just drive down there with a truck to San Antonio at the warehouse, and say, "I want 2,008 missiles." You have to have authority. And 2,008 Toe missiles--I don't know what one of them costs, but it's an awful lot of money, and somebody had to prepare the paperwork for the authorization to let the supply officer release those. And I'm sure they went to a cover unit that North was using for that purpose. But it appears from what we've heard from this that, unlike the way we used to run the cover operations, when these things got to Iran, these characters sold them them for money. In fact, they sold them for almost four times the listed value of these things. And this is the problem Congress has been having--is what happened to the money after they got there. And you can see how the system developed. You see, originally, we developed it on this one-for-one basis. Another thing is we never used this kind of supply, to deliver grenades to the Contras and charge them $9.00 a grenade or whatever it was. We just delivered the grenades. It was part of a Government program. And the CIA would reimburse the Defense Department. Everything came out even. We didn't "sell" anything.
