L. Fletcher Prouty

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 to 1990s, as a key source for conspiracy theories about it. He was the inspiration for the character "X" in Oliver Stone's film JFK.

Early life

Prouty was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on January 24, 1917, to Marie Ozias Desautels, age 32, and Leroy Fletcher 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.

His first brother Robert Vincent was born one year later on May 9, 1918, and they were joined by a sister Muriel two years after that on September 28, 1920. Another baby girl joined the family on March 24, 1921, and was named Corinne Marie; she later went by Corinne Toole. The youngest of the Prouty children, a boy named Norman Peter, was born 1926. Corinne was his only sibling to survive him.

Prouty attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst (then known as Massachusetts State College), and on September 20, 1936, he was elected president of his freshman class, "the Class of 1940", succeeding Daniel G. Lacey. 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.

Government service

World War II

Prouty was commissioned as a reserve second lieutenant in the cavalry on June 9, 1941, and began his military career with the 4th Armored Division in Pine Camp, New York. He was promoted to first lieutenant on February 1, 1942. He transferred to the United States Army Air Forces on November 10, 1942, and earned his pilot wings that same month. He arrived in British West Africa (specifically the British Gold Coast colony) in February 1943 as a pilot with Air Transport Command.

In the summer of 1943 he was the personal pilot of Generals Omar Bradley, John C. H. Lee, and 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 from November to 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.

Post-war service

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 U.S. Air Force and the CIA. As a result of a CIA commendation for this work he was awarded the Legion of Merit by the U.S. Air Force, promoted to colonel, and assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Following the creation of the Defense Intelligence Agency and termination of the OSO by Secretary Robert McNamara, Prouty was transferred to the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and charged with the creation a similar organization on a global scale.

From 1962 to 1963, he served as Chief of Special Operations with the Joint Staff. He would be delegated to Air Force Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, who in early 1961 became the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Special Operations. Lansdale later said Prouty was a "good pilot of prop-driven aircraft, but had such a heavy dose of paranoia about CIA when he was on my staff that I kicked him back to the Air Force." Rufus Phillips, who became famous for his insistence on telling the truth about American failures in Vietnam and for opposing the American escalation, later said Prouty was "a complete nut."