We have described the THE SECRET TEAM (ST). We have talked about who it is, what it does, how it operates. But it would be impossible to uncover everything about it and to attribute to it all that it really is. Likewise, it would be wrong to grant to this cybernetic, automatic-control machine more wisdom, more power, more sense than it really possesses. The worst possible mistake would be to overestimate it. It is not just one finite team of individuals. It is a matrix that changes with the gestation of each new operation. It is a sinister device of opportunity and contrivance. What does exist is the mechanism. What exists is the automatic system, much like a nervous system or an electrical system. More properly, what exists is like a giant electronic data processing machine, on the model of Ross Ashby's idea, which has its own power to grow, to reproduce, and to become more insidiously effective and efficient as it operates.
It is a great intragovernmental infrastructure that is fed by inputs from all sources. It can be driven by the faceless, lobbying pressure of a helicopter manufacturer, or of a giant Cam Ranh Bay general contractor. It can be accelerated by the many small pushes of hundreds of thousands of career military personnel -- uniformed and civilian -- who see higher rank and higher retirement pay as a goal worth seeking. It can be suddenly activated by almost any "counterinsurgency" area or similar "hot button" initiator.
This great machine has been constructed by such able men as "Wild Bill" Donovan, Clark Clifford, Walter Beedle Smith, Allen Dulles, Maxwell Taylor, McGeorge Bundy, and many others, who have guided and molded it into the runaway giant that it is today. It is big business, big government, big money, big pressure, and headless -- all operating in self-centered, utterly self-serving security and secrecy. As C. P. Snow has said, "The euphoria of secrecy goes to the head." And as Allen Dulles has said, perhaps in a slightly different context, this is really the craft of intelligence.
For all its fabrication and apparent unreality, especially in this open society, the ST machine does have a central soul or brain. . . or perhaps. . . holy spirit. It is the evidence of a form of new religion. It has its secrets. It has its divine and unquestioned rights and obligations. It has self-righteous power over life and death. It does not believe in anything. It does not value anything. It is utterly ruthless. Its greatest motivating force and drive is entirely undefined, because it moves by pressure. It reacts. It is therefore blind, meaningless, senseless. It will do anything in the name of anti-Communism. Yet in its greatest anti-Communist war it sees no inconsistency in the killing of one of its most anti-Communist creations -- Ngo Dinh Diem. In its zeal to rid the Caribbean of Communism, it leaps at the chance to rid the Dominican Republic of Latin America's strongest non-Communist, Rafael Trujillo. Any person or groups that know how to get to this infrastructure, who have the clearances, who have the need-to-know, can make an input into this ST, and as long as the desired action is anti-Communist, the system will operate.
As Kennedy saw, as Johnson may have seen, as Nixon's "nightmare" may suggest, there is but one way to control this massive ST structure. It must be uncovered. It must be made known. It must be exposed to the light. And then it must be told No. To be effective, this means that Congress must cut its money off, not only at the central source, but at all the hidden nerve centers.
Before it is too late, we Americans must realize that this great cancer exists. We must expose it for pro-American reasons; not as a work of anti-Communism. We have been subjected to so many anti-American and pro-Communist notions all in the name of anti-Communism, that words and facts almost elude us. We must look at all actions -- political, social, governmental, and international -- in terms of their being pro-American. There is such a world of difference between a truly pro-American positive action, and an anti-Communist passive, or reactive, operation.
It is not pro-American to pay barbaric tribute before the shrine of anti-Communism in Southeast Asia by sacrificing fifty-five thousand young men there. Neither is it pro-American to pay tribute in the amount of hundreds of billions of dollars before false altars of savagery there. There may be some argument, some slight argument, about such central effort being anti-Communist. We have been so brainwashed about the meaning of anti-Communism for twenty-five years that we may have forgotten what it really means. To be anti-Communist should mean that an action does have some effect upon real Communists and Communism; certainly the loss of not one Russian in an anti-Communist war can hardly be hurting the Russians one bit. But regardless of this semantic issue, the fact is that what had been going on in Indochina is not pro-American, and that is what matters the most.
Thus this ST must be exposed, bared, and silenced. Then a new and better way of life must be created. We must end the philosophy of Defense. The alternative is not simply Offense, either. The real alternative is the requirement for a sensible strategic concept to meet American needs, not to counter imagined and suspected Communist threats. We must end the policy of "Re-action" in favor of planned action and positive diplomacy. We must end the exploitation of secret intelligence by clandestine operations.
The first twenty-five years of the CIA have given solid evidence of how important the ideas of those legislators in 1947 were. The CIA should be, must be, the "quiet intelligence arm of the President". Not his nightmare. The CIA should be limited to the function of intelligence -- and not a bit more.
See Col Fletcher Prouty video "That Whole Bay of Pigs Thing...and how it led to the JFK Assassination
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RntvUGQ5IBQ
THE SECRET TEAM - The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World
L. FLETCHER PROUTY Col., U.S. Air Force (Ret.)
More Col Prouty public data information not discussed by the press or media
https://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/
https://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/USO/chp2_p1.html#pgfId=1469
https://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp23.html
We have described the THE SECRET TEAM (ST). We have talked about who it is, what it does, how it operates. But it would be impossible to uncover everything about it and to attribute to it all that it really is. Likewise, it would be wrong to grant to this cybernetic, automatic-control machine more wisdom, more power, more sense than it really possesses. The worst possible mistake would be to overestimate it. It is not just one finite team of individuals. It is a matrix that changes with the gestation of each new operation. It is a sinister device of opportunity and contrivance. What does exist is the mechanism. What exists is the automatic system, much like a nervous system or an electrical system. More properly, what exists is like a giant electronic data processing machine, on the model of Ross Ashby's idea, which has its own power to grow, to reproduce, and to become more insidiously effective and efficient as it operates.