An Introduction to the Assassination Business

An Introduction to the Assassination Business, by L. Fletcher Prouty (March 20, 1992)

Article: 528 of sgi.talk.ratical
From: [email protected] (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Subject: "An Introduction to the Assassination Business," by L. Fletcher Prouty
Keywords: clandestine ops includes domestic psychological warfare and murder
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Date: Fri, 20 Mar 1992 21:49:14 GMT
Lines: 417

excerpts from "An Introduction to the Assassination Business:"

Crimes such as these, some of which have remained open for years,
cannot be solved by any one individual. But there are patterns and
motives that serve to expose methods. In 1963, about one month
before President John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, a prominent
Washington lawyer died. It was ruled a suicide because it appeared
that he had put his own rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
His name was Coates Lear, and he was a law partner of Eugene Zuchert,
then Secretary of the Air Force. Lear knew a lot about special
airlift contracts and about the plans for Kennedy's fatal visit to
Texas. Then, for unexplained reasons, he began drinking excessively.
And when he drank, he talked. Soon he was dead. . . .

These are interesting cases. There were many reasons why both
of these men might have been assassinated and they both died in the
same manner. That type of "suicide" is one of the trademarks of
the professional "mechanic," the kind of killer who works in the
international assassination game. . . .

Since World War II, there have been hundreds of "coups
d'etats"--a euphemism for assassination. That list will grow as
long as the United States does its diplomatic work clandestinely. . . .
Eventually, practitioners of assassination by the removal of
power reach the point where they see that technique as fit for the
removal of opposition anywhere. That was why President Kennedy was
killed. He was not murdered by some lone, gunman or by some
limited conspiracy, but by the breakdown of the protective system
that should have made an assassination impossible. . . . In fact,
those responsible for luring Kennedy to Dallas on November 22, 1963
were not even in on the plan itself. . . . All the conspirators
had to do was to let the right "mechanics" know where Kennedy would
be and when and, most importantly, that the usual precautions would
not have been made and that escape would be facilitated. This is
the greatest single clue to that assassination. Who had the power
to call off or drastically reduce the usual security precautions
that always are in effect whenever a president travels? Castro did
not kill Kennedy, nor did the CIA. The power source that arranged
that murder was on the inside. It had the means to reduce normal
security and permit the choice of a hazardous route. It also has
had the continuing power to cover up that crime for twelve years.

----------------------------

The following appeared in the September, 1975 issue of "Gallery," a porno
magazine which billed Fletcher Prouty as the "National Affairs Editor."
Some people feel there is no credible way to justify associating oneself
with such exploitative and demeaning media. Fletcher Prouty has told me
that since the Ballentine paperback edition of "The Secret Team" was
"disappeared" soon after it came out in February of 1974, it was very
difficult for him to find publishers who would print his writings (from
9/74 to 7/75 he was able to get 7 articles published in "Genesis" (another
porno magazine), and from 9/75 to 6/78 he got 14 articles printed in
"Gallery)". Up until the Ballentine paperback was squelched, he had been
published in the likes of "The Nation," "The New Republic," (including
cover-story features), and "Air Force Magazine." It is a telling
indictment of the reality of the lack of public access to the mainstream
corporate press, that a man like Fletcher Prouty--who served in the Air
Force for 23 years, rose to the rank of Colonel, was a briefing officer in
the Pentagon from 1955 thru 12/31/63, serving also as Focal Point Officer
(liason) between the DOD and the CIA, first in the Headquarters of the Air
Force (1955 to 1960), where he set up and then ran the structures that
supplied Air Force logistical (military hardware) support for CIA
clandestine operations world-wide, then in the Office of the Secretary of
Defense (1960 into 1961), and then in the Office of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff (1961 thru 12/31/63) where he ran the same support for all branches
of the military--that a man possessing such critical first-hand experience
and knowledge of the mechanisms, methodogy and factual history of CIA
covert operations in this seminal period, would find his writings and
analysis of these important issues essentially barred from the most
generally accessible publications. As long as the conglomerate press in
this country continues to increasingly restrict the range and variety of
points of view being published, writers will resort to certain types of
publishers they would not choose to go to if they had a better alternative.

_______________________________________________________________________

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ASSASSINATION BUSINESS
(c) 1975 By L. Fletcher Prouty
reprinted here with permission of the author

Assassination is big business. It is the business of the CIA
and any other power that can pay for the "hit" and control the
assured getaway.
The CIA brags that its operations in Iran in 1953 led to the
pro-Western attitude of that important country. The CIA also takes
credit for what it calls the "perfect job" in Guatemala. Both
successes were achieved by assassination. What is this
assassination business and how does it work?
In most countries there is little or no provision for change of
political power. Therefore the strongman stays in power until he
dies or until he is removed by a coup d'etat--which often means by
assassination. The instance, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, for all
of his wealth and seeming power, died from an assassin's bullet
even though he was protected by an elite guard trained by a private
contractor selected by the United States Department of Defense.
This brings up the question of mechanics.

Foreign assassination, and to a degree domestic assassinations,
are set in motion not so much by a specific plan to kill the
intended victim as by efforts to remove or relax the protective
organization around the target. Thus, if the CIA secretly lets it
be known that it is displeased with a certain ruler and that it
would not act against a new regime, some cabal will certainly move
against him. Firstly, such CIA sentiment encourages cabals into
action and, secondly, it frightens the existing "elite corps."
Most palace guards are hated because they are oppressive. When
they learn that their CIA support is being removed or weakened,
they think of themselves first and begin to head for exile, leaving
the ruler vulnerable to the designs of a cabal. This is how the
passive "displeasure" of the CIA kills. The same applies to
domestic assassinations. Consider the following event.

The autopsy was routine: suicide. A high government official,
recently promoted, was found alone in his house, dead and with his
rifle beside him. A single bullet had shattered his head. There
were no other signs of violence. A poorly typed note to his wife
and son lay on the table near him. The hastily scribbled signature
was his own. But the "suicide" was an assassination. After his
promotion, the official had found papers in the files of his
predecessor that showed that the law had been broken, that huge
payoffs had been made, and that cases had been judged on the basis
of favoritism and bribery. Consequently, a major industry had
suffered grievously. An earlier administration had accepted this
corruption as part of its technique of staying in power.

The new official, a fair and honest man, had been deeply
troubled by what he had found. He had told his superiors and was
stunned when they told him to keep his mouth shut, that they would
take care of things. He had begun to drink heavily, and when he
was drunk, he had talked. He had become tense. But he worked long
hours and went through all the cover-up files. He reconstructed
what had happened and prepared a complete report and had just about
finished it. He did much of his work late at night at home.

On one of those evenings his wife had gone off on a visit and
his son was at college.

The phone call was calm and official-sounding: "This is the
police. Have you heard from your son recently? Well, something
has happened. "

The policeman said he would come right over to talk about it,
and added that he was out of uniform and was driving an unmarked
car. Yes, he would have identification: Fairfax County Police.
The car pulled up quietly. There was a quick knock on the door.
The policeman entered, showed his identification and was invited to
sit down. At the split second when the official turned to usher
the "policeman" into the house, he was hit a sharp blow on the back
of the head. He suffered a massive concussion and was dead. The
"policeman" went to a closet where he knew a rifle was kept (the
house had been well cased). The rest was simple. He hoisted the
body up on the end of the rifle with the muzzle in the victim's
mouth. One shot blew the top of the head off, removing evidence of
the first blow. The suicide note had already been typed on the
official's typewriter and the signature had been lifted from
another paper signed with a ball point pen.

In moments the "policeman" was on his way. The unmarked car was
left in back of the Forrestal building, where it had been taken
from a pool of cars, and the assassin was on his way by taxi to
Washington National Airport. He shuttled on the last flight to New
York. He had already made arrangements for a series of flights
that would take him to Athens. Less than twenty-four hours later,
he was on the beach south of the city, among old friends and
acquaintances in the modern world's equivalent of the Assassin
Sect. He was a faceless, professional, multinational "mechanic."
He earned good money and was convinced he was doing an essential
job for the power center that he believed would save the world from
communism. This story is, in most particulars, true.

Some time ago it was revealed that the CIA had been issued a
number of identification kits in the name of the Fairfax County,
Virginia, police department. This does not necessarily mean the
CIA planned to use those identities for the purpose of
assassination. In fact, it isn't clear what the CIA planned to do
with those documents.

The CIA has many gadgets in its arsenal and has spent years
training thousands of people how to use them. Some of these
people, working perhaps for purposes and interests other than the
CIA's, use these items to carry out burglaries, assassinations, and
other unlawful activities--with or without the blessing of the CIA.
Crimes such as these, some of which have remained open for
years, cannot be solved by any one individual. But there are
patterns and motives that serve to expose methods. In 1963, about
one month before President John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas,
a prominent Washington lawyer died. It was ruled a suicide because
it appeared that he had put his own rifle in his mouth and pulled
the trigger. His name was Coates Lear, and he was a law partner of
Eugene Zuchert, then Secretary of the Air Force. Lear knew a lot
about special airlift contracts and about the plans for Kennedy's
fatal visit to Texas. Then, for unexplained reasons, he began
drinking excessively. And when he drank, he talked. Soon he was
dead.

The same pattern fits the case of William Miles Gingery, the
scenario of whose death we have outlined above. He had been
promoted to chief of the office of enforcement of the Civil
Aeronautics Board. He had found many irregularities in that office
when he took over, and he was scheduled to appear before Senator
Edward M. Kennedy's Committee of Administrative Practices and
Procedures.

Gingery, a nondrinker, had begun drinking and was obviously
terribly upset. One night he was found dead. His death, in early
1975, was ruled a suicide; it was found that he had put the muzzle
of his rifle into his mouth and fired.

We hear much today about the CIA and the subject of
assassinations. The agency has been linked to the assassination in
1963 of Ngo Dinh Diem, the then president of South Vietnam, and of
his brother Nhu. The Diems were killed in October 1963. During
the summer of 1971 Charles Colson and E. Howard Hunt, among others,
were interested in seeing what could be done to forge and alter
official State Department messages to make it appear that President
John F. Kennedy was directly implicated in these assassinations.
This is an important point. If the White House wanted so badly to
tie in a dead president to that plot, it must have known then that
President Kennedy was *not* involved and that records proved that
he wasn't. The timing of this "dirty tricks" project is
interesting. Some months previous, the "New York Times" had
published the Pentagon Papers. The "Times" version of the Papers
contained a somewhat detailed but mixed-up version of the events in
Saigon during the late summer of 1963, just before the Diems were
killed. Anyone reading those papers carefully would discover that
the CIA had been close to the assassination plan and that it had
men on the scene. But nowhere in the Pentagon Papers is there any
message or directive that states in so many words, "The Diems will
be assassinated." Even lacking this explicit document, many
researchers will still conclude that the CIA was mixed up in the
affair, and will conclude also that Kennedy did not order the
murders. In 1963 Hunt was an active CIA agent and was deeply
involved with the then former Director of Central Intelligence,
Allen Dulles, whom Kennedy had fired.

So when the Nixon White House directed Hunt to forge State
Department records in order to make it appear that JFK *had*
directed the assassination of the Diems, the White House knew what
it was doing, the CIA knew what it was doing, and Hunt most
certainly knew what he was doing. But they goofed.
Even if they had succeeded in making it appear that JFK had
ordered the killing of the Diems, it would not have stood up,
because that is not how political assassinations are done. The
clue is that assassination is a murder of an enemy of the sect (and
this can mean many things today), and that it is performed as a
sacred religious duty. No one has to direct an assassination--it
happens. The active role is played secretly by permitting it to
happen. Take the case of the Diems.

By the summer of 1963 the Diem regime had been in full control
of South Vietnam for ten years and the country was going from bad
to worse. By August 1963 memoranda were being circulated in the
government; they were unmarked, with no classification, and were
hand-carried from person to person. These memos stated such things
as, "We must find a way to get rid of the Diems." This was the
summer of extreme and fanatical discontent in Vietnam, including
Buddhist uprisings and self-immolations.

The situation led to a series of inquiries from the CIA in
Washington to Saigon in order to assess the opposition--what its
strength might be and whether any of its prospective leaders might
be better suited for the interests of the United States than were
the Diems.

The CIA, which had placed the Diems in power, was severely split
over this problem. One faction wanted to keep Diem and go along
with his further demands. Another was ready to drop him and begin
again with someone else. There were two favorites in Washington
and many more in Saigon. Thus the ground work for an assassination
began.

Word got out that the United States "might" withdraw its support
of the Diems. This played into the hands of every Saigon cabal.
But it did something more important. As the word got out, the
people affected most were those who benefited from the Diem regime.
The Diems' secret police, their elite guard, and the Diems' inner
circle began to realize that they had better move fast. They had
been oppressors, murderers. They had stolen hundreds of millions
of dollars. Without the support of the United States, the CIA, and
the Diems these inner elite were dead. As word began to get around
Saigon, everyone began to think of evening their scores against the
hated Diems. Death was in the air. As the elite began to fade
away, the Diems' strength was dissipated rapidly.

Yet in Washington, removed from the harsh reality in Saigon, it
seemed only wise to study the situation from every angle. As
August gave way to September, President Kennedy vacillated, the
State Department did little, and the CIA kept firing out messages
to its agents on all sides. Gradually a plan took shape. Madame
Nhu, who had ridiculed the Buddhist victims by saying that if they
wanted to "barbecue" themselves it was none of her business,
suddenly realized that it might be a good time to take a long trip
to Europe and the United States. This was the first phase. Next
would be to get the Diems out of the country. Plans were made for
them to attend an important meeting in Europe and they received
formal invitations. A special plane was to fly them there.
As their departure date approached, the CIA instructed its
agents to work closer with the prospective new regimes. This
hastened the disintegration of the Diems' elite guard. Then, for
reasons that have never been clear, the Diems having gone as far as
the airport, turned, stepped back into their car, and sped to their
palace. They must not have understood how the game worked. If
they did not leave the country, they would be dead. They returned
to an empty palace. All of their guard had fled. The actual
killing was a simple thing--"for the good of the cause." The
United States and the CIA could wash their hands of it, for they
had nothing to do with it. Like all assassinations, it just
happened. In Washington the White House had tried to "save" the
Diems, and by so doing, had preordained their deaths.
This is the assassination scenario and it works in almost all
cases, even when there is no elaborate plan. It would have seemed
that the White House, and especially an old professional like E.
Howard Hunt, would have known that it had happened that way and
that changing the records would only have implicated them deeper
than they already were by the summer of 1971.
And now, in 1975, there has been a flood of charges about
assassinations. Of course the CIA has been involved. It made it
its business to get close to the elite guards of a great many of
the Third World countries. As long as these nation's leaders play
the game, like King Hussein and the Shah of Iran, all goes well;
but if one of them gets out of line, or if some cabal begins to
grow in power and offer what might seem a better deal, then, as in
the case of the Diems, the power of the United States will be
withdrawn. Then, without doubt, the King is dead.

Most Americans are not aware of the fragility of Third World
governments. Many have a military no larger and no more effective
than a good-sized army band. Many have a "King's Guard" that is
inadequate. The most trusted of the guard control the ammunition
supplies; every time ammunition is issued for training, a close
count is kept of expended rounds. Therefore no matter how wealthy
the king may be, or how much wealth his country may possess in
valuable raw materials, it will not assure his security. Rather,
his money tends to threaten his life.

Thus these puny sovereigns must appeal to some greater power for
their protection. For many years the United States, usually
through the CIA, has provided the training for the elite guard.
Without his guard, King Hussein of Jordan would have been dead or
deposed long ago. His guard is trained by the CIA, even including
paratrooper training by a clandestine military assistance program
provided by the United States Air Force and the Army, though it is
under CIA control. Similarly, many rulers in Asia, Africa, and
Latin America owe their positions and in most cases their lives to
the United States and the CIA, and most recently, to private
corporations hired to train, and thereby control, the "elite
guard."

This is how it begins; then comes the escalation. An elite
guard is a small organization. As the ruler realizes his
vulnerability, like the Diems and like the now deposed Haile
Selassie of Ethiopia, he begins to look beyond the guard. He
discusses an increase of his small and unskilled army with his
"trainers"--the CIA. They are quick to say that he should have a
larger army and that they can get him a military assistance program
from the United States, provided he pledges undying loyalty. Now
the program begins to pay off. A modest military assistance
program of, say, fifty million dollars is begun. Of course, the
entire amount is spent in the United States for American equipment.
An old rule in the military assistance program is that whenever a
piece of equipment is provided, ten times its cost will be spent
for spare parts before it wears out. This is where the
manufacturing companies make a real killing, for with spare parts
they can charge whatever they want.

The next escalation is as follows: if the ruler of one country
has been given a fifty-million-dollar program, each of his
neighbors asks for similar programs for self-defense. Since World
War II this has been a trillion-dollar business. Meanwhile, trade
missions from the United States begin to work over the client
states to see what natural resources can be acquired and for what
price, while the CIA works with selected American manufacturers to
portion out various franchises, such as Coca-Cola and Singer Sewing
Machines. Through this device other selected families in the
client country are put on the road to becoming millionaires and
powers in their own country. This creates power centers that at
times are played off against each other, as the CIA sees fit.
Eventually, the structure explodes, the elite guard weakens, and
unless the ruler is a hard-headed pragmatist and leaves
immediately, he will be assassinated.

Since World War II, there have been hundreds of "coups
d'etats"--a euphemism for assassination. That list will grow as
long as the United States does its diplomatic work clandestinely.
Why else has Henry Kissinger "shuttled" from country to country in
the Middle East? If his relationship with each of these countries
is an undercover relationship, then he cannot meet with them
publicly and in a group.

Eventually, practitioners of assassination by the removal of
power reach the point where they see that technique as fit for the
removal of opposition anywhere. That was why President Kennedy was
killed. He was not murdered by some lone, gunman or by some
limited conspiracy, but by the breakdown of the protective system
that should have made an assassination impossible. Once insiders
knew that he would not be protected, it was easy to pick the day
and the place. In fact, those responsible for luring Kennedy to
Dallas on November 22, 1963 were not even in on the plan itself.
He went to Texas innocuously enough: to dedicate an Air Force
hospital facility at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio. It was
not too difficult then to get him to stop at Fort Worth--"to mend
political fences." Of course, no good politician would go to Fort
Worth and skip Dallas. All the conspirators had to do was to let
the right "mechanics" know where Kennedy would be and when and,
most importantly, that the usual precautions would not have been
made and that escape would be facilitated. This is the greatest
single clue to that assassination. Who had the power to call off
or drastically reduce the usual security precautions that always
are in effect whenever a president travels? Castro did not kill
Kennedy, nor did the CIA. The power source that arranged that
murder was on the inside. It had the means to reduce normal
security and permit the choice of a hazardous route. It also has
had the continuing power to cover up that crime for twelve years.

--
daveus rattus

yer friendly neighborhood ratman

KOYAANISQATSI

ko.yan.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language) n. 1. crazy life. 2. life
in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating.
5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.