Real Life Mr. X in Oliver Stone’s JFK Participated in Pioneering Covert Operations

New Documentary Explores Life and Legacy of Fletcher Prouty, who wrote about CIA covert operations in his classic book The Secret Team

In a famous scene in Oliver Stone’s epic 1992 film JFK, Kevin Costner’s character confers with a shadowy CIA operative played by Donald Sutherland known as Mr. X who tells him about the existence of a conspiracy behind the JFK assassination.

Mr. X is modeled after the real-life character of L. Fletcher Prouty, a Pentagon official in the 1950s and early 1960s who served as the Air Force’s liaison to the CIA.

Prouty became known to the public when he published magazine articles about the CIA and the classic 1973 book, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973).

This book included damning information about previously unknown CIA covert operations and alleged that the U-2 crisis of 1960—resulting from the Soviets shooting down the U-2 spy plane—had been set up to sabotage Eisenhower–Khrushchev peace talks.

Prouty is the subject of a 2024 documentary film produced by Jeff Carter, a Vancouver-based filmmaker and audio-technician, entitled Fletcher Prouty’s Cold War.

The film includes historical footage mixed with interviews conducted with Prouty by “deep-state” researcher John Judge along with commentary by Len Osanic of Black Op Radio, who also interviewed Prouty, and Oliver Stone.

Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1917, Prouty recounts in one of the interviews how he enlisted in the U.S. military prior to World War II after joining ROTC in his freshman year at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Training with the U.S. Air Force as a pilot, Prouty was ordered to join the Air Transport Command and began flying VIPs around North Africa, Europe and the Middle East during World War II. These VIP’s included General Omar Bradley and Cyrus R. Smith, the founder of American Airlines and war-time deputy commander of the U.S. Air Transport Command.

Through this work Prouty came to participate in a pioneering covert operation in Saudi Arabia that helped pave the way for Aramco’s setting up shop there and a historic agreement between FDR and the Saudi Royal Family.

Prouty’s job was to fly a group of petroleum engineers into Saudi Arabia who were carrying out a geological survey designed to help identify where there were oil deposits in the country.

Prouty was given instructions to buy civilian clothes and to take the military markings off his plane. When Prouty arrived in Jeddah, there were no airports; he was told to look for burning oil and to land in a field near there.

On the ground he met four Americans, including Floyd Oligher, the General Manager of Aramco, a subsidiary of Standard Oil of California, which set up huge operations in Saudi Arabia at the end of World War II.

Prouty told Judge that they had discovered some of the purest oil in the world in Saudi Arabia and “have been pumping that oil ever since.”

Prouty’s experience in Saudi Arabia educated him about how oil went hand-in-hand with U.S. covert operations, and how these operations were designed to advance U.S. corporate interests and control over vital world resources like oil.

Prouty received another education when he escorted a Chinese group to the Great Powers conference in Tehran, where Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek was accompanied by his brother-in-law T.V. Soong, who was then the richest man in the world.

The U.S. supported Chiang and Soong in the Chinese Civil War over the Maoists who wanted to redistribute wealth and lift up China’s peasantry.

An agreement was worked out at the Tehran conference by which Mao would work together with Chiang and the West to help defeat the Japanese, though later the U.S. turned against Mao.

In the 1950s, the CIA organized secret anti-communist teams headquartered in Taiwan and Burma among Chiang’s defeated forces to try and destabilize the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which was established in 1949 after Mao’s victory over Chiang in the civil war.

At the end of World War II, Prouty flew over devastated Japanese cities that underscored for him the destructiveness of U.S. air power.

Tokyo, he said, was the worst, after it had been flattened during the March 1944 firebombing, when the U.S. Air Force dropped incendiary bombs designed to create large-scale fires.

Prouty is quoted in the film stating that “Tokyo was so bad, you looked out on the street and everything had been flattened. A trolley was running smoothly over city blocks that had once had buildings because everything was flat on the ground.”

Prouty also flew over Hiroshima and said that whatever happened there, it happened instantly, all in one direction. “The buildings were bent outwards and looked powder grey. Everything was burnt and broken.”

Prior to his time in Asia, Prouty was given the job of picking up POWs in Romania and the Middle East. Prouty said that, along with the U.S. army soldiers, he also picked up some Nazis. The latter had been recruited by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS-forerunner to the CIA) under Operation Paperclip because of their perceived value to the U.S. in the nascent Cold War.

The key figures behind Operation Paperclip were Allen Dulles, the OSS Station Chief in Switzerland during World War II and future CIA Director, and Frank Wisner, the OSS Station Chief in Romania and later director of CIA clandestine operations.

Dulles epitomized the link between the intelligence world and high finance as he had worked for the law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented U.S.-based Fortune 500 corporations and German businesses that supported Adolf Hitler such as Thyssen Steel Works and I.G. Farben (manufacturer of Zyklon B that was used to gas Jews and others in the concentration camps).

Prouty said that many of the American companies represented by Sullivan and Cromwell had offices in Germany that they did not close when World War II broke out, only after Pearl Harbor. Even then, Dulles maintained his Nazi contacts, which proved useful once the Cold War started.

At the end of World War II, Dulles forged a secret agreement with Nazi spy chief Reinhard Gehlen: In exchange for immunity from prosecution for war crimes, Gehlen would allow for the recruitment of his network by U.S. intelligence and the sharing of his files on the Soviet Union and Eastern European communist movements.

According to Prouty, Gehlen was brought to the U.S. by Walter Bedell Smith, the first CIA director, and made an American general. He helped shape the aggressive and paranoid anti-communist foreign policy of the U.S. in the early Cold War years.

The CIA learned from him the technique of spreading anti-communist propaganda—something Gehlen had learned from Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels—to secure public support for the Agency’s operations.

In the late 1940s, Prouty was sent to Yale University to teach courses and write textbooks on military strategy and the evolution of warfare in the ROTC program.

To prepare himself, he read the Congressional Record and newspaper articles about the 1947 National Security Act, which created the National Security Council (NSC) and CIA.

Prouty says that the original purpose of the CIA was to coordinate U.S. government intelligence gathering—there was nothing in its charter giving it authorization to carry out clandestine paramilitary or regime-change operations.

In 1948, when President Truman authorized a study of the CIA headed by Allen Dulles (the Dulles-Jackson-Correa report), Dulles pushed for expanded CIA powers, including the right to carry out covert operations approved by the NSC if they were “reactive” to an outside threat or act of aggression.

Dulles became a master at playing up the Soviet threat and politicizing intelligence to help legitimize expanded covert operations based on the above pretext, according to Prouty.

After his stint at Yale, Prouty was assigned to Colorado Springs to develop the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) radar defense system, which pioneered the use of computers in collating and analyzing data.

These computers were used to manage troop rotations and military operations during the Korean War, which Prouty says was a war that signaled the CIA’s coming of age.

Prouty was assigned to the Air Force base in Montgomery, Alabama during the war where he wrote military manuals on the deployment of strategic air power in the nuclear age. His studies helped him understand the horrific nature of nuclear weapons and how they could not be used to win wars, only to destroy humanity.

In spring 1952, Prouty was sent back to Southeast Asia where he became the manager of the Tokyo International Airport, which was run by the U.S. military’s occupation force in Japan.

Prouty returned to flying VIPs and would fly CIA station chiefs to their posts across Asia and fly supplies in support of CIA clandestine operations.

One of the major operations he helped supply was run by Air Force General Edward Lansdale, who worked to build up the Filipino army under Ramon Magsaysay to defeat the left-wing Hukbalahap.

Lansdale told Prouty that one of his techniques in helping to build Magsaysay’s popularity was to send a team of army officers dressed up as Huk rebels to maraud in a particular village and then have Magsaysay and his men come in and set up a fake battle where they drove the Huk marauders out. Then Magsaysay would reach out to the village chief and tell him he was there to protect the village from the Huks and look after the villagers’ interests.

In this way, Magsaysay helped to win “hearts and minds” and gained the upper hand in 1953 presidential elections over his political rival Elpidio Quirino, whom Lansdale’s agents drugged before giving a political speech to make him seem incoherent. Magsaysay had sent word to Dwight Eisenhower that he would “do anything the United States wanted him to do.”^[1]

Prouty said that Lansdale was “the epitome of a CIA agent” and “consummate professional” who was close to people in big business. He had nothing personal against Quirino but had a job to do to ensure his defeat, which he succeeded in doing.

When Prouty asked Lansdale what his most effective weapon was in waging the Cold War, Lansdale said it was money. Lansdale told Prouty he could buy anyone off because the CIA had given him a blank check to do what he believed was necessary to achieve U.S. political goals.

After the Philippines, Lansdale went on to South Vietnam to try to build up the U.S. client government of Ngo Dinh Diem in a similar way he had built up Magsaysay in the Philippines.

Prouty emphasized how significant the CIA was to U.S. policy in Vietnam and how its operations led directly to the Vietnam War.

Special Forces officers working with the CIA trained and equipped Diem’s army and police agents who triggered a guerrilla war in the South after they initiated a campaign of repression targeting members of the Vietminh who had resettled in the south after the defeat of the French.

The CIA also had run an operation to recruit Catholics into the South to provide a base of support for Diem, who favored Catholics in an overwhelmingly Buddhist country.

In 1955 Prouty was given his assignment as the Air Force’s CIA liaison by which he provided air support for CIA operations, including in South Vietnam.

In his new job, Prouty developed a comprehensive understanding of how covert operations are run, including the concept of plausible deniability by which they had to be kept secret and blame could be diverted if they went wrong.

One case where the CIA’s cover was blown was at the Bay of Pigs—the covert operation to train Cuban exiles to overthrow the Castro government after the Cuban Revolution. In that case, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson was caught lying to the UN when he claimed that only Cuban planes manned by Cuban pilots were used in the operation.

The lie was exposed when a plane that was used was shown to have eight guns, something the Cubans were known not to possess.

Another major covert operation in which Prouty was involved was in Indonesia, where the CIA financed Muslim insurgents and regional separatists seeking to undermine Indonesia’s socialist government led by Sukarno.

Prouty said that he personally ordered the delivery of 42,000 rifles to Indonesia and that the CIA was using submarines off Indonesia’s southeast coast as part of its regime-change operations, which were on such a large scale that they were not really covert.^[2]

The CIA by this time had amassed military paraphernalia and a mass arsenal of guns, which Prouty said made it more of an army than an intelligence organization.

The 1960 U-2 incident exemplified how covert operations were adopted to preserve the climate of the Cold War and prevent peace from breaking out.

Prior to this incident, which helped whip up anti-Soviet feelings across the U.S., Dwight Eisenhower had met with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Kansas and had been planning a major peace summit that had to be canceled.

Prouty says that the U-2 plane Francis Gary Powers was flying in was sabotaged by the CIA in a way that forced him to lower the altitude of the flight to a level that would make him visible to the Soviet Air Force.

Prouty, who was Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the early 1960s, sees the JFK assassination as another example of the CIA’s commitment to perpetuating the Cold War.

He was among three people to identify Edward Lansdale in a picture taken of a man walking away from Dealey Plaza (where Kennedy was killed) shortly after the assassination.

In the film, Prouty recounts how JFK developed a feud with the CIA as a result of the Bay of Pigs operation where the CIA had wanted him to order air strikes on Cuba, which Prouty says was an impossibility that Dwight Eisenhower also rejected.

Kennedy made further powerful enemies when he threatened to repeal the oil depletion allowance (tax subsidy for oil corporations) and developed a plan to Vietnamize the Vietnam War and withdraw U.S. troops in his second term, according to Prouty, who helped write two key National Security Action Memorandums (NSAMs) just before Kennedy was killed.^[3]

When Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 (three weeks after Diem was assassinated), Prouty was on a mission to the South Pole to survey an American nuclear reactor that was being developed there.

He decided to resign from the Pentagon when he returned,^[4] and criticized the Warren Commission Report and its conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was JFK’s assassin, writing a book on the CIA’s involvement that heavily influenced Oliver Stone’s movie JFK.^[5]

Prouty never actually met Jim Garrison, the prototype for Kevin Costner’s character in JFK and the New Orleans District Attorney who prosecuted CIA agent Clay Shaw for his involvement in the JFK assassination and investigated other conspirators.

Garrison was really tipped off about the fraudulent nature of the Warren Commission by Hale Boggs (D), a Louisiana congressman close to Lyndon Johnson who sat on the Warren Commission.^[6]

While Garrison’s encounter with Prouty may have been invented, Donald Sutherland’s character is in many ways true to life as Prouty was an insider turned whistleblower who exposed the truth about the CIA as he saw it in his writings.

For bringing uncomfortable information to light, Prouty was subjected to smears in the media and is derided in liberal intellectual circles today as a “right-winger,” “crackpot” and “conspiracy theorist.”

Fletcher Prouty’s Cold War restores the historical reputation of a highly intelligent and earnest man who helped expose the CIA’s history and its evolution into the monstrosity that it is today.

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• Readers can watch Fletcher Prouty’s Cold War here

1. 
   

   A. B. Abrams, China and America’s Spheres of Influence: Tipping Points to Decide a New Cold War (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Company, 2024), 137, 138. Lansdale’s secret team spread rumors suggesting that another of Magsaysay’s political rivals, Senator Claro Recto, was a Communist Chinese agent. Lansdale’s agents also prepared a poison to give to him. When Magsaysay once said he wanted to read a speech written by a Filipino instead of Lansdale, who wrote all of Magsaysay’s speeches, Lansdale allegedly went into a rage and knocked him unconscious. ↑

   
   
2. 
   

   The late 1950s clandestine operations with which Prouty was involved helped to set the groundwork for the 1965 CIA-backed coup against Sukarno that empowered right-wing Army General Mohamed Suharto and resulted in genocidal massacres targeting Indonesia’s Communist Party, which had been to that point the largest communist party in Southeast Asia. ↑

   
   
3. 
   

   I agree with much of what Prouty says and have respect for him, though have some differences with him about Kennedy and his assessment that he was a throwback to the Roosevelt era. Kennedy had criticized Roosevelt’s Vice President Henry Wallace when he pushed for sustaining positive diplomatic relations with the Soviets after World War II and, as president, zealously championed counter-insurgency operations to counter “wars of national liberation” across the developing world. Kennedy also adoptd relatively conservative, pro-corporate policies, and supported U.S. economic imperialism under programs like the Alliance for Progress. See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “The Liberal Savior as Conservative: John F. Kennedy’s Foreign Policy,” Class, Race and Corporate Power, 12, 2 (2024). The reason I believe the CIA old guard hated Kennedy was in part because he placed operational planning for covert operations in the hands of the Special Group on Counterinsurgency (CI), headed by Robert F. Kennedy, in which the CIA was marginalized. Considering Bobby to be arrogant, the CIA feared the establishment of a Kennedy political dynasty. ↑

   
   
4. 
   

   In 1964, Prouty was awarded a Joint Service Commendation Medal by General Maxwell Taylor. ↑

   
   
5. 
   

   After his retirement from the Pentagon, Prouty went to work for an aerospace company and then for Amtrak before embarking on his career as a writer. Prouty’s writings yielded valuable insights into the CIA. For example, as Jim DiEugenio points out, he was one of the first to detail that the Agency had lists of cleared attorneys and doctors in major cities who could be called upon to cover up certain crimes the CIA committed. Prouty’s book JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, introduction by Oliver Stone (New York: Citadel Press, 1992) argued that the assassination of JFK was a coup d’état. ↑

   
   
6. 
   

   Boggs was killed in a suspicious plane crash after he was slated to become Speaker of the House. Foul play is suspected; it was feared he could reopen the JFK murder investigation. ↑

   
   

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