PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Like it or not, we now live in a new age of "One World." This is the age of global companies, of global communications and transport, of global food supply and finance and...just around the corner...global accommodation of political systems. In this sense, there are no home markets, no isolated markets and no markets outside the global network. It is time to face the fact that true national sovereignty no longer exists. We live in a world of big business, big lawyers, big bankers, even bigger moneymen and big politicians. It is the world of "The Secret Team."
In such a world, the Secret Team is a dominant power. It is neither military nor police. It is covert, and the best (or worst) of both. It gets the job done whether it has political authorization and direction, or not. It is independent. It is lawless.
This book is about the real CIA and its allies around the world. It is based upon personal experience generally derived from work in the Pentagon from 1955 to 1964. At retirement, I was Chief of Special Operations (clandestine activities) with the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. These duties involved the military support of the clandestine activities of the CIA and were performed under the provisions of National Security Council Directive No. 5412/2.
Since this book was first published in 1973, we have witnessed the unauthorized release of the "Pentagon Papers," "Watergate" and the resignation of President Nixon, the run-away activities of the "Vietnam War", the "Arab Oil Embargo" that led to the greatest financial heist in history, and the blatantly unlawful "Iran-Contra" affair. All of these were brought about and master-minded by a renegade "Secret Team" that operated secretly, without Presidential direction; without National Security Council approval -- so they say; and, generally, without Congressional knowledge. This trend increases. Its scope expands...even today.
I was the first author to point out that the CIA's most important "Cover Story is that of an "Intelligence" agency. Of course the CIA does make use of "intelligence" and "intelligence gathering", but that is largely a front for its primary interest, "Fun and Games." The CIA is the center of a vast mechanism that specializes in Covert Operations...or as Allen Dulles used to call it, "Peacetime Operations". In this sense, the CIA is the willing tool of a higher level Secret Team, or High Cabal, that usually includes representatives of the CIA and other instrumentalities of the government, certain cells of the business and professional world and, almost always, foreign participation. It is this Secret Team, its allies, and its method of operation that are the principal subjects of this book.
It must be made clear that at the heart of Covert Operations is the denial by the "operator," i.e. the U.S. Government, of the existence of national sovereignty. The Covert operator can, and does, make the world his playground...including the U.S.A.
Today, early 1990, the most important events of this century are taking place with the ending of the "Cold War" era, and the beginning of the new age of "One World" under the control of businessmen and their lawyers, rather than the threat of military power. This scenario for change has been brought about by a series of Secret Team operations skillfully orchestrated while the contrived hostilities of the Cold War were at their zenith.
Chief among these, yet quite unnoticed, President Nixon and his Secretary of the Treasury, George Schultz, established a Russian/American organization called the "USA-USSR Trade and Economic Council," in 1972. Its objective was to bring about a union of the Fortune 500 Chief Executive Officers of this country, among others, such as the hierarchy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with their counterparts in the Soviet Union. This important relationship, sponsored by David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank and his associates, continued through the Carter years. The bilateral activity increased significantly during the Reagan/Shultz years of the Eighties despite such "Evil Empire" tantrums as the Korean Airlines Boeing 747 Flight 007 "shootdown" in 1983.
It is this "US-TEC" organization, with its counterpart bilateral agreements among other nations and the USSR, that has brought about the massive Communist world changes.
The Cold War has been the most expensive war in history. R. Buckminister Fuller has written in Grunch of Giants:
We can very properly call World War I the million dollar war and World War II the billion dollar war and World War III (Cold War) the trillion dollar war.
The power structure that kept the Cold War at that level of intensity has been driven by the Secret Team and its multinational covert operations, to wit:
This is the fundamental game of the Secret Team. They have this power because they control secrecy and secret intelligence and because they have the ability to take advantage of the most modern communications system in the world, of global transportation systems, of quantities of weapons of all kinds, of a world-wide U.S. military supporting base structure. They can use the finest intelligence system in the world, and most importantly, they are able to operate under the canopy of an ever-present "enemy" called "Communism". And then, to top all of this, there is the fact that the CIA has assumed the right to generate and direct secret operations.
--L. Fletcher Prouty
Alexandria, VA 1990