Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World

Though this book is now over 40 years old, I found the information very relevant and 100% trustworthy from one of America's true Patriots. Colonel Prouty served his country for decades as a pilot and as an integral part of the Department of Defense and CIA. Though for nine years Colonel Prouty was the liason between the Air Force and the CIA's clandestine affairs, he is able to reveal confidential information that would typically be classified "Top Secret", because Colonel Prouty did not work for the CIA and therefore did not have to sign a confidentiality agreement with the nefarious CIA. What is fascinating about Colonel Prouty is that he was everywhere throughout his career. He watched world affairs as they unfolded, meeting the most influencial leaders of his time. From FDR, Stalin, Churchill, Ike and every general and admiral in our military. For the nine years from 1954 to 1963, he was involved as the go to guy for the military leaders and the president, including both Ike and JFK. In other words, Colonel Prouty writes from personal and direct experience. Now the meat of the book is about the creation and abuses of the 1947 created CIA. From the end of World War Two until the mid 1970's, the CIA abused its primary responsibility of intelligence gathering to literally unchecked clandestine and covert upheavels in every part of the world. The CIA, particularly under Allen Dulles, created one coup d'etat after another. The reader will realize that from 1945 until the Marines reached the shores of Viet Nam in 1965, every piece of skulldruggery in Viet Nam was done by the CIA. The CIA had infiltrated the entire government, from the Department of Defense to the Department of State. Many people would be shocked to know that what passed as Defense activity was acually generals and admirals, wearing their uniforms and working for the CIA. Whether it was advising the President, subverting Ambassadors or lying to Congress, the CIA ruled and few knew what they were really doing. Colonel Prouty tells the stories accurately of every subversive, nefarious act the CIA was involved in. One example in particular stands out. It was Ike's goal at the end of his 2nd term as president to have a peace conference with the USSR, one to sign a peace treaty and end the cold war. In direct violation of the presidents specific instructions not to fly U-2 flights prior to the conference in June of 1960, the CIA flew the ill fated Gary Powers flight that guaranteed that the conference would go forth. This was a most important conference that could have brought nuclear peace accords decades before they were eventually signed. Dulles and his henchmen deliberately insured that Gary Powers not only violated the order not to fly these observations flights, they insured that it would be downed by sabotaging the flight and thus force Ike to either admit he knew or fire the bastards who embarrassed him. Ike chose to take responsibility and thus the peace talks were cancelled. There was also another flight in 1958 that was downed in the Soviet Union. Most Americans would be shocked to know the CIA has their own private air lines, Air America. This is no small air lines. Had Colonel Prouty written this book later, he could connect the CIA with the massive drug smuggling that has devastated American cities. They use the proceeds of this smuggling to finance their illicit involvement of other sovereign countries. Bottom line is this is an important book as is his 1993 JFK & Viet Nam. Colonel Prouty was a significant advisor to Oliver Stone and his masterpiece, JFK. I am currently finishing the rereading of said book. If you want to know who has controled our foreign policy (against the charter that created this monstrosity) since the mid 1940's, this is an excellent book to begin with. It is my personal opinion, having read many books on the CIA, that their main function is to serve the multi-national corportations and the bankers that exploit the less developed countries around the world and to insure that there will never be peace. There will not be a World War Three, because nuclear weapons would most likely be used and earth as we know it will cease to exist. Therefore, limited, no win conflicts will continually persist. Beginning with Korea, to Viet Nam, to Iraq to Afganistan. The irony is we are wasting our human resources and our treasury to bankrupt our country while both Russia and China sit back and spend zero (USSR & Afganistan is the exception) and develope the kind of infrastruture and consumer goods as well as education that we should be doing. Finally, the record of the CIA leaves a lot to be desired. There were many failures despite billions of dollars spent and the infiltration into every branch of our society, from education to media to think tanks to the military. Read this book and you will also discover the misadventure in Viet Nam that cost 58,000 plus American casualities, millions of Viet Namese, millions of service men who would never be the same after this debacle. Colonel Prouty explains this better than anyone I have yet to read. He predicted another debacle (Iraq & Afganistan) after the Viet Nam debacle. I believe Cononel Prouty passed away last decade, but he would not have been shocked by the rediculous misadventures in both of the above foremetioned countries. Think of the trillions of dollars and the bloodshed lost on a military misadventure that has no way of producing a positive outcome for the United States. Stephen Courts August 7, 2012

What does it mean when we say " the CIA did such and such an action"? Just what is the CIA, a whole or a part? Given its emphasis on compartmentalization, is it accurate to say "the CIA was heavily involved in the JFK assassination" or would it be more accurate to say parts of the CIA were? Moreover, who is the CIA, and what are the powers behind it? Also, perhaps most importantly, what were the relations between the CIA and other parts of government, and how and when did these relationships change and evolve. Were these changes done democratically or secretly. These last two questions are the essence of this book. Yes, it is true as one reviewer noted, this book could have used an editor. Some times it has the feel of a collection of speeches, but not always. So why the five instead of 4. The subject matter-- in particular the last two questions typed above-- are just too rarely mentioned and discussed. This book really helps us understand the curiously evolving nervous system of the CIA btw 1947 and 1963, as very very few other books do. It sees the inception of the CIA in 1947 as just the first step, and makes it clear that later developments were neither willed nor pre-ordained by many of the elected officials who wrote the National Security Act of 1947. The only other book that really addresses this BETWEEN WORLD--i.e. between CIA and other government agencies is one of the Three most important books published in the last 50 years IMO. Thy Will Be Done: Nelson Rockefeller, Evangelism, and the Conquest of the Amazon In the Age of OIl by Colby and Dennett. Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon : Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil Still there is one book I recommend even more than that one. This is not the current Gold Standard merely for all current JFK research. It is far more than that; it is the Gold Standard for all US Cold War History Research. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass. This book is so important because it is not merely who done it but why done it. It is a book that mixes how and why of JFK and those crucial-because-contestable Cold War years 1960-63 like no other. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

Very informative but suspect also in certain regards. For example, the acclaim his serves up upon General Lemnitzer is odd since Lemnitzer was fired by JFK after proposing the Operation Northwoods which would involve clandestine government services staging acts of terrorism in Miami, other Florida cities and even in D.C. wherein scores of US citizens would be murdered and the blame would be heaped upon Cuba. In my world a military man of this stripe is court-marshaled and imprisoned as a traitor. I think the most important point the book makes is that it matters not who is the illusionary chief of state, it will be the military-industrial complex barons of war who are calling the shots and most of the "disastrous misdeeds being served up to the public as justification for yet another war or foray into foreign territory are simply stage management and are done by the Secret Team for the benefit of US public opinion.

This book provides a rare glimpse into the secret history and evil machinations of the CIA as it mutated from its original form between 1946 up until the time the book was published in 1973 when it had become a cancerous blight within the government. It should not be surprising that most people never really understood the so called Vietnam War and they still don't. Even people in the American government like the Secretary Of Defense were completely confused and manipulated by the Agency as it's called. President Kennedy was somewhat inexperienced when he first entered office. JFK thought he could handle problems in the government in the same way he handled problems during his presidential campaign. He had an informal style at first where he would just ask a friend to take care of it. This caused JFK to disregard important checks and balances which had been set up to hopefully prevent the CIA from crossing the line from being just an intelligence agency into the realm of initiating clandestine military operations. The National Security Counsel was supposed to give direction to the CIA and then the Operations Coordination Board was supposed to verify that the CIA had done what they were told and only what they were told. But even before JFK got into office the Agency had taken many determined steps to undermine those controls. JFK's informal style opened the door even wider for the Agency to circumvent whatever controls may have still been effective to put some sort of limits on their 'fun and games'. Having an informal style with them was dangerous because they were experts at getting around all sorts of rules and laws. The Agency double crossed JFK during the Bay Of Pigs debacle. Publicly JFK took the blame for what happened but according to Fletcher it was the CIA who cancelled the air support that would have destroyed Fidel Castro's planes on the ground. As a result JFK's only options were to accept the blame or admit to the world that things were being done by the American military establishment that he wasn't even aware of. John Kennedy was a fast learner however and he stated that he would break the CIA up into a thousand tiny pieces. JFK was fed up with all of the Agency's fun and games. Something similar happened with the Gary Powers U2 spy plane that had to land in the Soviet Union. The evil Secret Team sabotaged the U2 to derail President Eisenhower's lifelong dream of holding a worldwide peace summit. Like JFK Ike accepted the blame publicly. Ike's only other option would have been to admit that the U2 flight was unauthorized and then fire Allan Dulles and the other leaders of the evil Secret Team. But Fletcher says Ike couldn't do this for various reasons even though Nikita Khrushchev probably realized that Eisenhower did not break his word and authorize the U2 mission. Ike's comments about the Military Industrial Complex which he made during his farewell address turned out to be very prophetic indeed. These examples provide the picture of an Agency that had become a law unto itself which reinterpreted whatever orders it was given to make those orders conform to their evil schemes. Fletcher provides many details in the book about how the Agency was able to circumvent laws and regulations and manipulate anyone and everyone in the government starting with the president. They did this mainly by abusing their control of secrecy but they used many other methods as well. Secret Team leader Allan Dulles wrote a book called 'The Craft of Intelligence'. The title of this book sort of indicates the very problem Fletcher Prouty explains in his book. Dulles viewed himself as a sort of artist or craftsman who could distort information and make it appear in any form he wanted. Strangely Fletcher refers to his close personal friendship with Allan Dulles in the acknowledgements at the beginning of the book but then spends the rest of the book portraying Dulles as a sort of Joseph Goebbels figure. Fletcher spends over 300 pages describing the metamorphosis which occurred with the CIA as it veered very far afield from what president Truman had intended when he created the Agency. Then towards the end of the book Fletcher finally reveals his shocking conclusions about what this massive abuse of power lead to. Fletcher felt that the assassination of president Kennedy was the single most pivotal event in modern American history as far as the changes that the assassination caused. Sadly as Fletcher points out the Vietnam War never really had any military objective. The theory was that if South Vietnam fell this would cause a domino effect and the dreaded communism monster would start gobbling up the entire world. Then when South Vietnam did fall with no domino effect the Secret Team published a group of documents called the Pentagon Papers. These documents deflected blame away from the CIA and said nobody listened to the CIA when they warned that the Vietnam situation was not winnable. But it wouldn't matter if anyone listened to the Secret Team anyway because they always lie. This book presents an American government in chaos during the Vietnam era. It was a government that had been high jacked by the evil Secret Team. After the Bay Of Pigs incident Fidel Castro apparently got fed up with the CIA and America in general. Castro turned to the Soviet Union instead. This lead to the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was only in the last 10 years or so that people realized just how close the world came to an all out nuclear exchange at that time. This was a very dangerous game master craftsman Allan Dulles and his other liars were playing. They were like kids starting fires all over the place in a big field and then just sitting back and seeing which of those fires would become an inferno as Vietnam did. Also in recent years people have implicated Lyndon Johnson as being part of the conspiracy to assassination JFK. So LBJ was on the team also. I'm not sure if Fletcher ever really spells out what the true motivations of the Secret Team were but he hints at it. Probably the three main reasons that people engage in criminal activity are sex, money, and revenge. Usually when crimes are committed there's a money trail somewhere. And in the case of government military spending that's a very long trail. This is a serious book which contains many details about an approximately 25 year period that began after World War II. It is not light reading. On the Trail of the Assassins: One Man's Quest to Solve the Murder of President Kennedy JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy David Ferrie: Mafia Pilot, Participant in Anti-Castro Bioweapon Plot, Friend of Lee Harvey Oswald and Key to the JFK Assassination The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination Dr. Mary's Monkey: How the Unsolved Murder of a Doctor, a Secret Laboratory in New Orleans and Cancer-Causing Monkey Viruses Are Linked to Lee Harvey ... Assassination and Emerging Global Epidemics Top Secret/Majic: Operation Majestic-12 and the United States Government's UFO Cover-up Watch this documentary series on the internet. The hypocrites have pulled it off the market: The Men Who Killed Kennedy The Men Who Killed Kennedy DVD Series - Episode List 1. "The Coup D'Etat" (25 October 1988) 2. "The Forces Of Darkness" (25 October 1988) 3. "The Cover-Up" (20 November 1991) 4. "The Patsy" (21 November 1991) 5. "The Witnesses" (21 November 1991) 6. "The Truth Shall Set You Free" (1995) The Final Chapter episodes (internet only): 7. "The Smoking Guns" (2003) 8. "The Love Affair" (2003) 9. "The Guilty Men" (2003)

This is NOT a "conspiracy theory" or fiction. Fletcher Prouty's "The Secret Team" could just as easily be titled "How the Deep State Became a Force For Evil." It could turn into a serious award-winning documentary. In 1991, producer-director Roger Stone tried it with his version based partly on Prouty's accounts, with the movie "JFK," but no one listened. Stone's film appeared in a renewed swirl of Secret Team / Deep State liberal BS "conspiracy" accusations during the Clinton White House falderal. Later, the movie "Air America" with Mel Gibson - told the authentic chain of events (via fiction) based on Prouty’s work; arms deals, hookers, cheap whiskey, opium, and the rest - as did his follow-up 2002 true story recorded in the movie "We Were Soldiers Once and Young" - bar none, the two most accurate portrayals of the middle and latter stages of the Vietnam War. Prouty's work is well documented, logical, thoughtful, and conclusive regarding the new Air Force and CIA founded in 1947 by the National Security Act. After my Vietnam Air Force experiences (more than two years, 1969-1971) as a daily briefer at the "wing command" and general officer level in Vietnam's II-Corps - where we followed the CIA down sometimes ridiculous and costly rabbit holes that led to over 58,000 dead Americans - and assisted our 5th Special Forces, MAC-V, and CIA's "Air America" - I would be pleased to sign an oath and "Affidavit of Truth" in support of Col. Prouty's ENTIRE account. Every officer and senior non-com above administrative and boots-on-the-ground squad levels - became trained liars for the US intelligence community. Anyone who disagrees, including high-ranking "veterans" who say differently - is lying. They must have learned their DoD counter-intelligence propaganda lessons well - especially if they tell you a different story while invoking the vague and trite, "I can't tell you for reasons of "national security." Everything we did in our 20-year history related to Vietnam (1953-1973) was filtered through the lens of political "plausible deniability" - everything - before it was reported to the public, and Prouty exposes it all. I was there. I saw it and, to my lasting shame, facilitated the lies I was fed unwittingly at age 24. “The Secret Team” is an easy read that I could not put down in the summer of 2022. It may be a shock to any reader born after 1960. If you want to know the truth about the CIA's sinister, planned conversion that began in 1953 by the hand of Allen Dulles and his deputies, Frank Wisner and Desmond FitzGerald six years after its inception (and the first CIA re-organization in 1950 by Bedell Smith and William Jackson) - through the so-called Afghanistan and Iraq "wars" - you will learn that ALL, not some, ALL wars are financed on both sides by the corrupt Wall Street actors and their elite masters in the European central banks - and the public be damned - all for blood-profits.

Bought for a friend as a bday gift . huge hit

The fact that this book all but disappeared when it was distributed in the 1970's tells all that the CIA did not want any of its "dirty laundry" aired in public. Prouty does an excellent (almost over the top) job of describing the rise and strategies and evolution of the CIA up through the 70's. That the Vietnam War was still controlled by the CIA at the writing of the original book also shows JFK had not gained control of the military-industrial complex. For those who are wanting to fill in more pieces of the puzzle this is an excellent source from a man who found himself in the thick of things for many years. The one shot-coming comes in the last chapter in his description of Nixon and especially LBJ not being able to control the military industrial complex either. Consequent independent research over many years seems to show LBJ who was about to go to jail and be dropped from the 1964 ticket, knew about and helped cover up the JFK assassination and is known to have remarked: "Just get me elected and you can have your damn war". There is also evidence Nixon and company undermined the 1968 peace talks as LBJ was trying to end the war and LBJ actually called Nixon and asked him to back off. ( Kinda like the Oct 1980 surprise by Reagan). Consequently we know from Judyth Vary Baker that Lee Oswald was the the assassin of JFK and he in fact was on the payroll of the FBI and CIA. James E Files has confessed to being one of the shooters and E. Howard Hunt told his son, he was involved and he was CIA at the time. But no One man can possibly know everything. Given the pervasive infiltration of government, military and probably many civil institutions by the CIA, one wonders who comprises the shadow government in reality?

I've been a devout student of Fletcher Prouty for fifteen years. Fletcher Prouty is a hero almost beyond measure in clandestine American history. 'The Secret Team' is and always will be one of the most important books of all time. However, this version is actually a slight rewrite from the original Prentice-Hall/ICHS version; and the incidental changes that have been added to this flawless American classic, I'm sorry to say, make it weaker, not stronger. I'm not saying people shouldn't read Fletcher Prouty; just understand that if you want the original book -- the real Coke rather than the new Coke -- you want to avoid this printing, even though it's available, and even though it's cheap. Some classics are better left alone, and this is one of them.

This is an extremely important book. The proof of it is that even the official copy in the Library of Congress disappeared (!). Moreover, even after his death, the author continues to be the object of a smear campaign (see internet). His book is not less than a frontal attack on US intelligence and concomitantly on those who control it. Its portrait of Allen Dulles, a longtime intelligence director, says it all: `I am a lawyer'; in other words, a servant. But of whom? This book unveils the existence of a secret cabal, a Power Elite (G. William Domhoff), a `deep State' (P.D. Scott) within the US and its government as well as in about 40 host countries. This Power Elite uses the Secret Team of top intelligence and military commanders as its long arm and protects it. Together they stand above the law and the democratic process. They get things done, whether they have the political authorization or not. They dispose of a vast undercover political, military, intelligence, business, media and academic infrastructure, in the US as well as worldwide. They don't respect the nation State and are able to create, to influence and to topple governments in the hemisphere controlled by them. The author gives a remarkable insight into the inner workings, the logistics, the strategies and the tactics of the intelligence agency. Its creation and history show that President H. Truman never intended to create an autonomous operational agency in the clandestine field. L.F. Prouty also gives valuable information about the U2- G. Powers incident (apparently to torpedo the US/USSR peace talks) and the Pentagon papers (an intelligence whitewash). At the end, the author poses the all important question: `Can any President ever be strong enough really to rule?' This book is a must read for all those interested in US history and for all those who want to understand the world we live in. For more information on the Power Elite, I recommend the works of O. Tunander, D. Estulin, Peter Dale Scott, Carroll Quigley, Gary Allen and G. W. Domhoff.

In the realm of such issues often people don't have a deep inside knowledge but this author has and gives a well and insightful look into the workings of the CIA from world war II till the Vietnam war.

THIS BOOK IS NOT WORTH IT, FACTUAL INFO REGUGETATED ADNAUSIUM

Probably the best book on CIA i read. No whitewashing, everything you need to know about CIA and critiques other cia author books objectively (allen dulles, l.kyrkpatric..). Must read, mint condition book (collectible).

I would call this a must read for anyone interested in freedom and Liberty. This explains and exposes the corruption within the US government bureaucracy.