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L Fletcher Prouty
US officer obsessed by the conspiracy theory of President Kennedy's assassination
Michael Carlson
Fri 22 Jun 2001 01.47 BST
It is appropriate that Fletcher Prouty, who has died of organ failure following stomach surgery at the age of 84, will best be remembered as the model for the mysterious Colonel X, played by Donald Sutherland, in Oliver Stone's film JFK.
Prouty, who believed the assassination of President John F Kennedy was a coup d'รฉtat perpetrated by elements of the United States military and intelligence communities, was a career military man who spent a decade liaising between the Pentagon and the CIA. After leaving the US Air Force (USAF), he became an outspoken critic of the intelligence establishment, although by the time JFK was filmed, he had been relegated to the fringes along with countless other conspiracy crackpots.
When asked why he did not use Prouty's name in the film, Stone said: "Because the man does not want to be known, he doesn't want to be traced." Yet his identity was common knowledge. It seemed that the shadowy image of the figure Sutherland portrayed, instructing the naive New Orleans attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner), was one Prouty was proud to fit.
As a young man in Massachusetts, his early ambition to become a singer was interrupted by the second world war. He served, first, as an army tank commander, and then as a transport pilot. His CV shows him providing VIP transport for the key allied conferences in Cairo and Tehran, as well as evacuating a Guns of Navarone-style commando team from Turkey. He claimed to have flown in the first overt cold-war mission, rescuing Nazi intelligence officers from the Balkans at the bequest of the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, in 1944.
In 1955, Prouty was assigned to coordinate operations between the USAF and the CIA, and remained in intelligence duties until retiring in 1964 to join an aircraft company. He later worked in banking and public relations, while writing on intelligence topics and the assassination of Kennedy.
His 1973 book, The Secret Team, was reviewed seriously. In it, Prouty called the CIA, and the cold war, a cover story, which had allowed elements of the military and intelligence community to work on behalf of the interests of a "high cabal" of industrialists and bankers. It found a ready audience in the atmosphere of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, and, in the light of Iran-Contra and CIA drug-running controversies, many of its revelations have been confirmed.
A mass-market paperback was published by Ballantine in 1974, but the book immediately became hard to find. Prouty believed it was "disappeared"; at any rate, copies remain collectors' items.
After that, his writing became increasingly marginalised. He wrote for Genesis and Gallery, two men's magazines, or in specialist journals, such as People And The Pursuit Of The Truth. He continued to develop links between the secret team and the Kennedy assassination, characterising the events in Dallas as a way of thwarting the US president's plans to take control of the CIA after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
General Edward Lansdale was in charge of Operation Mongoose, aimed at overthrowing Fidel Castro. As General Y in the JFK film, he assigns Prouty to a South Pole trip, to remove him from the Pentagon at the time of the assassination. Prouty later claimed that Lansdale was in Dallas - and visible as a passer-by in the famous "tramps" photograph - on the day Kennedy was killed. "He was there like the orchestra leader, coordinating these things," he said.
In 1986, Prouty's book-length manuscript, The Role Of Intelligence In The Cold War, appeared as a series in a magazine called Freedom, published by the church of Scientology. Like other assassination critics, he found an outlet via the Liberty Lobby, a far-right organisation with ties to Holocaust deniers.
Although Prouty himself never espoused such beliefs, the connection enabled critics to dismiss his later writings. He helped them by publishing articles that made easy targets, such as his revelation that, according to President Franklin Roosevelt's son, Kermit, himself an OSS/CIA man, Stalin believed "the Churchill cabal" had poisoned Roosevelt, and his widow, Eleanor, had kept his coffin closed to stop anyone finding out.
Following the release of JFK, Prouty's book, JFK, The CIA, Vietnam, And The Plot To Assassinate John F Kennedy, was published by the small, independent Birch Lane Press. He remained active, via his own website, until his death, and is survived by his wife, Elizabeth, and three children.
ย Leroy Fletcher Prouty, Jr, soldier and author, born January 24 1917; died June 5 2001