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."Leroy Fletcher Prouty Jr, 1917–2001." Ancestry.com. . Accessed July 28, 2021. 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.Staff writer. (obituary). Washington Post (January 9, 2001). Archived from the original. 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.Staff writer. "Forester's Group Votes Faith in Commissioner." Boston Globe (January 29, 1937), p. 12."L. Fletcher Prouty." In: Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale (February 19, 2003). Gale In Context: Biography. . He later pursued his graduate studies in banking at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Graduate School of Banking.Prouty, L. Fletcher. "Transportation at the Crossroads", Traffic Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 3 (July 1981), pp. 385–399. . .
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."
In a chance encounter with Edward Lansdale in the hallways of the Pentagon, a "month or two before" the assassination (as Prouty tells it), Lansdale informed Prouty he had arranged for him [Prouty] to accompany a group of VIPs to the South Pole from November 10 to 23, in the capacity of Military Escort officer. The ostensible purpose of the trip was the activation of a nuclear power plant at the U.S. 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.Ratcliffe, David. Interview with L. Fletcher Prouty, at his home (audio). (1989). The activation of the plant, PM-3A, actually occurred on 3 March 1962, a year and a half earlier than Prouty claimed.The Antarctic Environmental Awareness Pages
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.
Post-military
Railroads 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.
Writing 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 wrote the introduction to Mark Lane's 1991 book Plausible Denial.
Church of Scientology In the early 1980s, Prouty's services as an expert witness were retained by the legal team of the Church of Scientology to act as consultant in the investigation of L. Ron Hubbard's military record.
By early 1985, Hubbard's naval record was again the subject of increasing scrutiny. Julie Christofferson Titchbourne of Portland, Oregon brought her case against the Church at that time, and Scientology's lawyers again turned to Prouty to help them manage the public relations fallout. Prouty was forthcoming with an affidavit on their behalf by February. In it, he stated his belief that the records released by the U.S. Navy documenting Hubbard's service in the armed forces "are incomplete ... those materials and records provided give ample evidence that proves the existence of other records that have been concealed, withheld and overlooked."Prouty, L. Fletcher. (February 1, 1985). Archived from the original.
...to provide proof of the fact that the records, data and related materials provided by the U.S. Navy (USN) and other government sources, all said to be the complete record and file on the military service, active and inactive, of Mr. L. Ronald Hubbard, formerly Lt. Commander, U.S. Navy Reserve, are incomplete ... [and] to attest to the fact that those materials and records provided give ample evidence that proves the existence of other records that have been concealed, withheld and overlooked.
Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, had said that he sustained combat injuries during his military service in World War II and that he healed himself through measures that would become Dianetics. However, Hubbard's military record does not show that he was wounded in combat. Church officials have stated that those records were incomplete and may have been falsified. Prouty, according to Church of Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis, reported that Hubbard was an intelligence agent, and because of this his military discharge papers were "sheep dipped", meaning two sets of government records were created documenting Hubbard's service.
Prouty's association with Scientology also provided him with a platform for his writing over the following decades, serving as senior editor of Freedom magazine, an official publication of the Church. Between 1985 and 1987, Freedom published a 19-part series by Prouty which it described as having "provided a unique and highly informative view of the events which led up to the Vietnam War." The magazine later covered his perspective on the Jonestown affair. At times, he has described himself as "an editorial adviser to publications of the Church of Scientology."
Oliver Stone's JFK film Prouty served as a technical adviser to Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK. He was the inspiration for the mysterious "Mr. X" (played by Donald Sutherland), who assists Jim Garrison in the movie.
Personal life and death Prouty married Elizabeth Ballinger on October 5, 1942, and with her he fathered three children: David Fletcher, Jane Elizabeth, and Lauren Michele.
Colonel Prouty died on June 5, 2001, at the Inova Alexandria Hospital in Alexandria, Virginia. Age 84, he died of organ failure following stomach surgery. 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.
Controversy