RADIO TV REPORTS, INC. PROGRAM: TEN O'CLOCK NEWS -AN INTERVIEW WITH COL. PROUTY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01350R000200460021-1
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 26, 2004
• Sequence Number: 21
• Publication Date: March 19, 1973
• Content Type: PREL

RADIO TV REPORTS, INC. v - 2oc -rfi pS, W'
Approved For Release 2005/01/13: CIA-RDP88-0135OR00020 60 1
4435 WISCONSIN AVE. N.W.. WASHINGTON, 0. C. 20016. 244.3540
W 384
FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS STAFF
5!C q.. 01- 2- I H `J C: C
PROGRAM Ten O' C l ock News '. STATION WTTG TV
DATE March 19, 1973 10:00 PM
Washington, DC .
AN INTERVIEW WITH COL. PROUTY
JOHN WILLIS: Tonight, Channel 5 News presents the first in a
five part series on the Central Intelligence Agency, its mission and its
operations. This insider's look comes from a man who was intimately
associated with the CIA for many years.
Walt Rodgers has the report.
WALT RODGERS: For fourteen years, Colonel Fletcher Prouty did
the Central Intelligence Agency's bidding for them at the Pentagon. If
a spy needed a special radio or a special camera, Prouty scoured the
Defense Department's inventories and usually came up with it. If the
CIA needed a special airplane to pick up an agent stranded behind the
Iron Curtain, Prouty got them their airplane. He was, in fact, the
procurement officer at the Pentagon that the CIA tapped whenever they
needed help. So he had a better overview of the agency's overall opera-
tions than perhaps many of the high level spooks themselves.
Colonel Prouty has jotted down some of the CIA's exploits in a
new book he's written called, "The Secret In it, he says he tried
to separate some of the myths from the realities about the Central Intelligence
Agency. So in discussing the book, I asked-him, first, does the CIA really
have a dirty tricks departmen:t.
COLONEL FLETCHER PROUTY: They certainly do. The agency's divided
very distinctly between its intelligence function and the other side of the
house. I.t's a complete, total -- they don't even -- people in either branch
don't even know each other. They know of each other's existence, but.they
don't work together. And so the dirty tricks shop, as you call it, Acme
plumbers, as the people in the business call it, they do anything that they
need in furtherance of their own goal.
RODGERS: For example, could you give us an example of dirty tricks
that the CIA would do?
COLONEL PROUTY: Well, in the old days the defector business was
very important. And they thought that if they could get people to defect
with a Soviet airplane or a Soviet built airplane, this was important, you
know. Now we call it hijacking, skyjacking. But when it's coming this way,
it wasn't skyjacking. We paid the man to do it. Now when it's going the
other way, ArppI btF6l-$2ele3[rpe)05 rA1 ]3 : CI>ol-RPREI." 1 MRQ4Q-2,OQ46WA1-And that
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