Лерой Флетчер Праути: от генерала до критика ЦРУ и вдохновителя фильма "ДжФК"

United States Air Force officer

Leroy Fletcher Prouty (January 24, 1917 – June 5, 2001) served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President John F. Kennedy. A colonel in the United States Air Force, he retired from military service to become a bank executive. He subsequently became a critic of U. S. foreign policy, particularly the covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which he believed was working on behalf of a secret world elite. Prouty's commentary on the Kennedy assassination circulated widely from the 1970s 90s, as a key source for conspiracy theories about it. He was the inspiration for the character "Mr. X" in Oliver Stone's film JFK.

Prouty was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on January 24, 1917, to Marie Ozias Desautels, age 32, and Leroy Flecther Prouty, a municipal government employee, age 28. He was the first child in a growing family and would eventually become one of five, with two brothers and two sisters. The youngest of the Prouty children, a boy named Norman Peter, was born 1926. He later pursued his graduate studies in banking at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Graduate School of Banking. Prouty belonged to a handful of membership organizations: the National Defense Transportation Association, the American Bankers Association, the Tokyo Toastmasters Club, and the Army Navy Club. In the summer of 1943 he was the personal pilot of General Omar Bradley, General John C. H. Lee and General C. R. Smith (founder and president of American Airlines), among others. He flew the U. S. Geological Survey Team in Saudi Arabia, October 1943, to confirm oil discoveries in preparation for the Cairo Conference. He was assigned to special duties at the Cairo Conference and the Tehran Conference November–December 1943. He flew Chiang Kai shek's Chinese delegation (T. V. Soong's delegates) to Tehran. An important mission he was involved in was the evacuation of the British commandos made famous by the novel Guns of Navarone involved in the Battle of Leros from Leros to Palestine. He was promoted to captain on February 1, 1944. In 1945 he was transferred to the Southwest Pacific and flew in New Guinea, Leyte and was on Okinawa at the end of war. He landed near Tokyo at the time of the surrender with the first three planes carrying General Douglas MacArthur's bodyguard troops. He flew out with American POWs.

After the war, Prouty accepted an assignment from the U. S. Army in September 1945 to inaugurate the ROTC program at Yale University, where he also taught during each scholastic year from 1946 to 1948. This timeline intersects with the years that George Bush and William F. Buckley, Jr. also spent at Yale. Prouty fondly recalled Buckley at that time in his role as editor of the Yale Daily News, and Prouty later told an interviewer in 1989 that he had written for Buckley on several occasions. In 1950 he transferred to Colorado Springs to build Air Defense Command. From 1952 to 1954 he was assigned to Korean War duties in Japan, where he served as Military Manager for Tokyo International Airport (Haneda) during the post war U. S. occupation. In 1955 he was assigned to the coordination of operations between the fledgling U. S. Air Force and the CIA. The ostensible purpose of the trip was the activation of a nuclear power plant at the United States Navy Base at McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, to provide heat, light, and sea water desalination. Prouty later described his confusion at the unusual assignment, but he expected the job to be a "paid vacation" and accepted the task. Prouty retired in 1964 as a colonel in the U. S. Air Force. As recognition of his long and distinguished career in the service of his country, he was awarded one of the first three Joint Service Commendation Medals by General Maxwell D. Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

He was a senior director of public affairs for Amtrak during the 1970s, and a director of the National Railroad Foundation and Museum. During this period he worked out of the Amtrak Corp. office in Washington, D. C.

Prouty authored two major books during his life, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World in 1973 and JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy in 1992. He served alongside friend and fellow researcher Eustace Mullins as contributing editor for a conspiracy magazine titled Criminal Politics. Prouty also published articles in a wide variety of publications, from pornographic magazines to peer reviewed journals to academic textbooks, illustrating the wide diversity in his intended audiences for different writings. His areas of expertise were cultivated by direct experience as well as research, and they range from railroads to assassinations to transportation to military strategy and logistics. His writings even include entries on Railroad Engineering and Foreign Railroad Technology for McGraw Hill's Scientific Encyclopedias and Scientific Yearbooks, as well as contributions to ROTC textbooks.

Prouty served as a technical adviser to Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK. He was the inspiration for the mysterious "X" (played by Donald Sutherland), who assists Jim Garrison in the movie.

Colonel Prouty died on June 5, 2001, at the Inova Alexandria Hospital in Alexandria, Virginia. His funeral service was held the next day at the Fort Myer Chapel, and he was subsequently buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.

As a critic of the CIA, Prouty pointed out its influence in global matters, outside the realm of U. S. congressional and government oversight. His works detailed the formation and development of the CIA, the origins of the Cold War, the U 2 incident, the Vietnam War, and the John F. Kennedy assassination. Prouty wrote that he believed Kennedy's assassination was a coup d'état, and that there is a secret, global "power elite," which operates covertly to protect its interests—and in doing so has frequently subverted democracy around the world. He said he had learned the information over four years earlier from E. Howard Hunt while doing work for the National League of Families. Prouty said that most federal government departments, including the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department, had similar CIA contacts and that he assumed that former president Richard Nixon was aware of Butterfield's role. Also interviewed by CBS, Prouty again stated it was Hunt who told him about Butterfield. On July 19, Church said that his committee found that there was "no scintilla of evidence" to support Prouty's allegations, and that his committee had ruled out the possibility that Butterfield served as a liaison officer for the CIA. Church also stated, "on close interrogation, Mr. Prouty is unable to substantiate his earlier statement and acknowledges this to be the case." According to Prouty, the movement of Kennedy after a bullet struck his head was consistent with a shot from the grassy knoll. William Blum made his own case for Prouty's version of events in his own book, Killing Hope, published in 2008. Bissell later claimed that Prouty was not authorized for access to U 2 information and said, "I don't see what information there could have been aboard that aircraft that could have helped the Russians" to bring down Powers' U2. Prouty was also named to the advisory board for the Lobby's Populist Action Committee. Prouty also sold the reprint rights for The Secret Team of the Noontide Press, the publishing arm for the Institute for Historical Review, a holocaust denial organization. In an obituary in The Guardian, Michael Carlson wrote that "[a]lthough Prouty himself never espoused such [anti semitic] beliefs, the connection enabled critics to dismiss his later writings."

"Anatomy of Assassination." In: Uncloaking the CIA. Conference on the CIA and World Peace at Yale University (1975). "Kennedy's Policy on Vietnam Led to His Murder." In: Assassination of John F. Kennedy. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press (2003). .

"Railroad Engineering." McGraw Hill Scientific Encyclopedia. "Foreign Railroad Technology." In: McGraw Hill Scientific Yearbook 1982.

World in Action [series] (Jun. 16–30, 1975). "The Rise and Fall of the CIA (Part 1)." Season 11, Episode 38. (Jun. 16, 1975). "The Rise and Fall of the CIA (Part 3)." Season 11, Episode 40. (Jun. 30, 1975). The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis (1987). Special Report by Bill Moyers. Who Killed Martin Luther King? (1989). Written and directed by John Edginton for BBC. Emmy nominated. The Men Who Killed Kennedy (1991). Directed by Nigel Turner. The JFK Assassination: The Jim Garrison Tapes (1992). Written and directed by John Barbour. The JFK Conspiracy (Apr. 15, 1992). Hosted by James Earl Jones. Written and directed by Daniel Helfgott. Beyond 'JFK': The Question of Conspiracy (1992). Directed by Barbara Kopple and Danny Schechter. Features Carl Oglesby.

Tomorrow with Tom Snyder: JFK Assassination. NBC (April 15, 1975) [56 min.] One in this series of late night topical interview programs hosted by Tom Snyder. This installment, occurring on the 110th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's death, focuses on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the many ongoing questions surrounding his death. Panelists include: forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht, attorney Bernard Fensterwald, and retired Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy.