THE SECRET TEAM

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01350R000200460018-5
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 26, 2004
• Sequence Number: 18
• Publication Date: April 2, 1973
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
2 April 19(3 ca~~.N5T r`t, r'! b
Approved For Release 2005/01/13 : CIA-RDP88-01350h000200460018-5
Story Behind the Book
P >n~~ ~ Y)L. FI &I C ~. ~
reA ry"
`The Secret Team'
said. "I've never felt any CIA pressures
on Inc concerning it, one way or another,
although sonic old associates knew what
I was doing. Actually I wasn't writing for
a publishing house under contract when I
started. It wasn't until 1970, when a
Prentice-hall editor, Brans Cavin, read
an article of mine in Washington
dlonthlt, that I was signed for the book
by Prentice-Flail. That article was also
called 'The Secret Team'-it got a good
reception, no backfires.
"I was never an official CIA smut,"
Prouty said. "So there was no question of
my signing an oath that might have kept
"But its an Air Force officer I was as-
signed to some of the CIA's earliest se-
cret operations in other countries. When
the Agency needed planes and special
material for it mission, I was their man
in the Air Force."
For nine years preceding his retire-
ment, Prouty had his own office in the
Pentagon, acting, among other things, as
custodian of secret CIA military files.
"I'd say' some 60 or 70'(* of the Penta-
gon Papers were in my files. 1 he Depart-
ment of Defense segregated the CIA-type
papers from regular militant' papers--
and I had them all, and knew what was in
them. When Lllsberg gays the Pentagon
Papers to the New York 'Iinic;s, I was
On Tuesday, March 6, Jack Anderson
began his nationally syndicated column:
" File cloak-and-dagger boys at the Cen-
?tral Intelligence Agency are tryin g to get
an advance copy of a book which is
highly critical of the CIA's 'dirty tricks
department.'
The book was Colonel F.. Fletcher
Prouty's " fhe Secret -I cant," due from
Prentice-Flail this month (1'1t' Forecast,
February 12).
A week prior to Anderson's column,
PUF' received it iCIephone request for
book proofs-purportedly from the same
Sidney Kramer Book Store in Washing-
ton that Anderson had named in his col-
umn as having contacted hint. Checking
with the publisher, PIF' learned of other
Worts by the CIA to get hold of the
Prouty Ballets by numerous other unsuc-
cessful devices. (As it regular practice,
/'11' returns Ballets only to the publisher
of it riven hook, on regt:e t).
Its curio,itc about the hook's author
duly whetted, PII' interviewed Colonel
Prouty. Now 56 ;in(] retired from the Air
Force Since 1903 (lie had sensed as a pilot
in World \\ an 11), Pruutt is currently
cniploted in pot ate husiaess in \\ asluno-
ton. 1nikt::e v.ith i'It', lie proscd forth-
corning., hot ti about the CIA and the :e.en-
esis of his hook.
"Broke rat retircntent I'tc put in about fair," frosty s.tid. "As ;i nt.itter of fact,
eight years of work on no honk," Ile my descripti rn of that I.atrn AArne?r
c. l l s b Q C?1 p r~ ~+ I
C /t country is a composite of a number of
CIA operations-hut the individual epi-
sodes are real, they're accurate, they hap-
pened.As for Tibet, I was in on it." In
1959, according to Prouty, the year be-
fore the famous Gary Powers-U-2 in-
cident that led Khrushchev to cancel his
summit Meeting with Eisenhower, a CIA
spy-plane had been downed in Russia. Its
crew, captured and then interrogated by
Soviet intelligence, was later quietly re-
turned to the U.S. (where Jaynes
McCord, an ex-CI1\ man recently in- t-
volved in the Watergate case, was among ,.
the debricfers). This earlier U-2 incident
is one of Prouty's more astounding. reve-
lations in his book.
"I was control officer in charge of that
plan`e's recovery," Prouty said. "I flew
over the wreckage. And 1 was originally
support officer in the Bav of Pigs as-
sault=that was back in 1959."
But, Prouty says, so many Miami-
based Cubans were involved then that the
CIA's cover was compromised if not
blown: and matters looked so dubious
when Allen Dulles rushed invasion plans
after JFK's 1960 presidential victory
that; as Prouty put it, "I removed myself
from the thole thin,, in a letter to the
Secretary of Defense in January, 1961."
Of all John F. Kennedy's intimate circle,
Prouty told /'IF, "I think only Bobby
Kennedy was beginning to see through
what was happening.''
NIany of 1'routy's old associates, he
believes, some still active in the CIA, feel
as he does now--that the CIA's opera-
tional as opposed to intelligence activi-
ties, notably from the Bay of Pius on-
ward, have seriously drained the nation's
strength and eroded its prestige.
Prentice-hall, bceinnine witli a
10,000-copy first edition, is at this writing
ready to start a second printing. Colonel
Prouty is hooked for it 'f\'-radio tour.
Meanwhile Ile is set to write his next
hook, shout the period October through
I>ceenther, 1063, which saw numerous
si,nili,ant ;usassinations ineludinr th;rt
ol'.lohn Kennedy, and winch Ile feels rainy
have (teen the most crucial brief period in
modern American histnrv.
AI Bt itt ft JOiI ~stO\
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Approved For Release 2005/01/13 : CIA-RDP88-01350R0 020d4gb01 5~1 ~~ ~) ('~ ~` r= I e~ ,
struck by how many papers-the ones
dealing with the CIA's secret overseas
operations, not just intelligence-were
simply not there. I doubt Lllshcre, ever
had them, and I think he may have been
used innocently by the CI,\ when lie
worked on the papers at Rand."
Ill an early chapter of -The Secret
Teant" Prouty writes about some re-
markable coup d'etat activities in a
Latin American country he calls
di;r," (hut which readers are free to iden-
tify as (Juatemala) and later he describes
the CI:\ its arming th0nu;urds of 1ihetans
in Support of the. I)al:ri Lama :rst;rirnsi in-
y;rdirn : Red Chinc;c forces (an ;r,-[ion
which a nary President I:i,cnh utter tcr-
ntin;tied).
"I wasn't irr\olted in the (iandia afi-