“a major accomplishment”
- Oliver Stone, filmmaker
“a fascinating and well-crafted documentary”
- Joseph McBride, author Political Truth: The Media and the Assassination of President Kennedy
“a worthy tribute to a worthy man"
- Jim DiEugenio, author JFK Revisited
available now on Vimeo On Demand
Col. L. Fletcher Prouty in the 1950s
L. Fletcher Prouty (1917-2001) experienced up-close and personally events categorized as the Cold War - the ideological struggle which defined the post-WW2 era. Perhaps best known today as the real-life model for “Man X” in the Oliver Stone movie JFK, beginning in the 1970s Prouty’s insights were shared in books (The Secret Team; Understanding Special Operations), articles, interviews and speaking engagements. Controversial at the time, Prouty’s accounts have since been verified by the declassified record.
The film combines Prouty’s archival record with new contemporary interviews featuring Len Osanic and Oliver Stone. Topics addressed include the Cairo and Teheran Conferences (1943), the National Security Act and creation of the CIA (1947), covert activity in Southeast Asia (1950s), the downing of Gary Powers' U2 spyplane (1960), the Bay of Pigs (1961), and the Kennedy administration’s policies towards Vietnam (1963). Osanic and Stone describe their personal interactions with Prouty in the 1990s.
Len Osanic with Oliver Stone
reviewed on the Kennedys and King website
Additional Resources
Len Osanic’s Fletcher Prouty Reference Site is available here
David Ratcliffe’s Topics on the National Security State includes Prouty’s book The Secret Team and the transcription of the 1989 interviews titled Understanding Special Operations, as well as numerous articles by Prouty. In response to the film, Ratcliffe offered the following as representative of “seminal moments” in Prouty’s military career:
1955: Attending the Armed Forces Staff College
https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/USO/chp1_p2.html#pgfId=3160"I was made the Commander of the Nuclear Force on the Blue team..."
"This is very important -- because I don't know of any other time when our military have actually confronted on the ground, on military maps, the force structures that would be used for such a defensive action, and then the impact of what nuclear weapons could do."
NSAM 55 -- JFK's Attempt to Get CIA out of Clandestine Operations
https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/USO/chp2_p3.html#pgfId=4865"When Kennedy said, "You are my advisor in peacetime as you would be in wartime," he is saying to the Chairman, `You are my Advisor for clandestine operations, and all the other operations being carried out in peacetime.'..."
"I can't overemphasize the shock -- not simply the words -- that procedure caused in Washington..."
"That NSAM No. 55 was more important during the Kennedy era than anything else except the assassination. …"
Prouty’s inside knowledge and grasp of events is on display in declassified testimony from July 1975 before the Church Committee, as he discusses some of the background of the Watergate scandal which otherwise took years to bubble to the surface.
John Judge, whose video interviews with Prouty also feature in the film, passed away in 2014. A tribute and collection of his works can be found here.
The CIA and Nazi War Criminals National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 146
Prouty’s information portrayed in the film can be confirmed through this document collection published by the respected National Security Archive
Producer and editor Jeff Carter used research undertaken for the film to inform an article describing Prouty’s own writings on the still controversial historic fact that the Kennedy administration had established policy in 1963 for an American withdrawal of soldiers and advisors from Vietnam by the end of 1965. The inclusion of this information in Stone's JFK triggered the initial flood of criticism directed at the film.
Prouty had many varied interests and talents. He did stay engaged with his love of music, as the choir heard during the closing credits includes Fletcher and he even takes a solo!
Len Osanic, a casual moment with Fletcher Prouty