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.In the latter case, the unit might be an AirForce Squadron that had aircraft and other equipment maintained inreadiness complete with well-trained crews ready to fly out for the Agencyon any of a great number of special missions.Everything possible wouldbe done to make it appear to be a real Air Force unit. Few people, even among those who are supposed to know all aboutthe Agency's relationship with the DOD, have ever known exactly howmany such units exist, and what is more important, what these units reallydo.One day back in 1960 or 1961, it was necessary for me to brief thechairman of the JCS on a matter that had come up involving the CIA andthe military.Such briefings, when they have been put on the regularagenda of the day, take place in a sort of reverse pecking order.Each itemthat comes before the Chiefs is briefed by its staff-supporting office fromthe least sensitive to the most highly classified.On this day there were anumber of briefings on all sorts of subjects.The room where the Chiefsmet was full and the anterooms were packed with briefing teams.One byone the teams were called in to give their briefings.As they finished, theywould be dismissed, and if the Chief of any given service had any of histop-level staff there with him, he might dismiss that officer along with thebriefers.(Sometimes, when one service is briefing, a Chief of anotherservice will want to have one or more of his senior assistants there to hearthe briefing with him.) As a result, as the briefings progress from leastclassified to most highly classified, the whole group begins to thin out.This is done with a very precise control, verging on the ritualistic.Finally, the briefings on atomic energy matters, missiles and space,and other highly classified matters took place.Then the Chiefs began tohear some of the more closely held intelligence matters.The last item wasthe one that pertained to the CIA operational information.As I wasushered into the room I noted that everyone was leaving except thechairman and the commandant of the Marine Corps.The chairman wasGeneral Lyman L.Lemnitzer, and the commandant was General David M.Shoup.They were close friends and had known each other for years.When the primary subject of the briefing had ended, GeneralLemnitzer asked me about the Army cover unit that was involved in theoperation.I explained what its role was and more or less added that thiswas a rather routine matter.Then he said, "Prouty, if this is routine, yetGeneral Shoup and I have never heard of it before, can you tell me inround numbers how many Army units there are that exist as "cover" forthe CIA?" I replied that to my knowledge at that time there were about605 such units, some real, some mixed, and some that were simplytelephone drops.When he heard that he turned to General Shoup and said,"You know, I realized that we provided cover for the Agency from time totime; but I never knew that we had anywhere near so many permanentcover units and that they existed all over the world."I then asked General Lemnitzer if I might ask him a question.Hesaid I could."General," I said, "during all of my military career I havedone one thing or another at the direction of a senior officer.In all of thoseyears and in all of those circumstances I have always believed thatsomeone, either at the level of the officer who told me to do what I wasdoing or further up the chain of command, knew why I was doing what Ihad been directed to do and that he knew what the reason for doing it was. Now I am speaking to the senior military officer in the armed forces and Ihave just found out that some things I have been doing for years in supportof the CIA have not been known and that they have been done, mostlikely, in response to other authority.Is this correct?"This started a friendly, informal, and most enlighteningconversation, more or less to the effect that where the CIA was concernedthere were a lot of things no one seemed to know.It ended with those twogenerals asking me about matters that they had unwittingly participated induring earlier years that they had never been told about.It was amazing, very basic, and very true that a great number ofoperations, some of them quite important in terms of foreign policy, andusually involving one or more foreign nations, had taken place in the guiseof military activities when in reality they were not.Since the military hadbeen used for support purposes, first in the context of war planning andlater for more open and more active roles, as the CIA and the ST becamemore powerful and bold, the military had continued to believe thatwhatever it had been asked to do must have been sanctioned from aboveby someone.This brings us back to the Dulles-Jackson-Correa report.One of themajor undertakings of that report was to place the CIA quietly within thestructure of the entire U.S.Government, ostensibly to obtain morecomplete secrecy when necessary.For example: It was necessary for theCIA to arrange for aircraft to enter the country quite frequently without theusual customs check that all military aircraft must undergo.In the earlieryears the CIA would arrange directly or through State or Defense to havecustoms waive inspection of a plane with classified cargo or carrying adefector or on some other highly classified mission.Then, when suchthings had become more or less commonplace, the CIA would politelyoffer to provide a few men to work with the regular customs personnel totake the burden for such activity from them.This was the way it was putin the first place, and the customs office would gratefully accept theassistance.The CIA would go through all the necessary steps to getauthorization for increasing the manpower allocations in the customsservice by the number of men it planned to put there and then to makearrangements to reimburse the customs office for the payroll and othercosts of the office.This latter step would always be taken, because it would be best forthe customs office to go through all of the normal motions of paying thesemen, including promoting them and paying for their travel or other usualexpenses, so that their assignment would appear to be completely normalto all others in the office.Then, by special accounting procedures thatwould take place in the main office, the CIA would reimburse theTreasury Department for the money involved.In the beginning this would all be done with elaborate open-handedness, even to the point where the new agency men would receivetraining and other prerequisites of the job.However, as the years passed, most of this procedure would be forgotten, and few would recall that thosespecial assignments had even originated with the Agency
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