
Subject: The Fourth Force -- initial CIA "expansion" via 40s Pentagon War Plans
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1992 15:24:29 GMT


         The Fourth Force is a major power.  It has been used to start
      major wars and is at full strength today.  The beginnings of Fourth
      Force activity may already be seen in the Middle East, and when the
      CIA is ready, action will begin there.  This is the real CIA.
         The Rockefeller Commission did not look into this because it had
      been penetrated on behalf of the CIA by David Belin, its chief
      counsel and former counsel of the Warren Commission.  In fact,
      Belin still reports to the CIA.  The Senate committee will not get
      into this because it has been penetrated by its chief counsel,
      William G. Miller.  Miller was recruited by the CIA in the Fifties
      when he was in Harvard, and the CIA assisted him by getting him a
      Foreign Service assignment in Iran from where he regularly reported
      to the CIA.
         The House committee investigating the CIA will not get into this
      subject because its leadership has never really wanted a thorough
      investigation of the CIA.  The committee is little known and it
      will not dig deeply.  This committee is working on government
      reorganization activities and is administered by Presidential aide
      Donald Rumsfeld.  This top committee has an active and important
      subcommittee on the Reorganization of the CIA.  The CIA may be
      reorganized, but there is little chance that any of the present
      investigations will get deeply and significantly into the Fourth
      Force concept.


  i am putting on-line a series of articles L. Fletcher Prouty wrote in the
  latter half of the 1970s that focused primarily on the CIA.  i feel they 
  are just as relevant today regarding aspects of the Agency's history and 
  formative years, something we as "outsiders" know virtually nothing about.  
.......           --ratitor


            the following appeared in the 12/75 issue of "Gallery:"
     ____________________________________________________________________
       The United States Military Consists of the Army, The Air Force,
                           The Navy and Marines, and
                               THE FOURTH FORCE
                             By L. Fletcher Prouty
                  reprinted here with permission of the author


      The Bay of Pigs in 1961 was a large military exercise.  It involved
      an air force, a navy, and a sizable over-the-beach force of Cuban
      expatriates.  The insurrection against the Sukarno government in
      Indonesia in 1958 involved more than 42,000 rebel troops, a good-
      sized clandestine air force, and a navy, including submarines.  In
      Tibet in 1959-60, more than 14,000 insurgent Khamba tribesmen were
      supported by a major airlift of arms over the Himalayan mountains.
         All of these programs, and many more, were under the operational
      control of the Central Intelligence Agency.  Yet the federal law
      that created the CIA to "coordinate the intelligence activities of
      other government departments and agencies" does not authorize
      clandestine activities such as those listed above.
         Where did the CIA get its power?  How could a small agency
      created to coordinate intelligence have grown to such a force that
      it assassinates rulers of governments and raises armies in support
      of rebel cabals around the world?  Congress does not fund these
      operations.  Yet the CIA has the power and the money to mount them.
         When the CIA sought thousands of arms and tons of ammunition for
      India's border police, it got them from the United States military.
      When the CIA wanted 42,000 rifles airlifted to Indonesian rebels,
      it got the United States military to do it.  When the CIA needed
      long-range transport aircraft to drop Tibetan sabotage teams on
      Chinese roadways in northwest China, it got the planes, the
      training, and the equipment from the United States military.
         But the United States military is held accountable for its
      equipment and is banned from engaging in clandestine activities.
      How does the CIA arrange this?  How does the CIA repeatedly defy
      the rest of the United States government?  The answer lies in its
      ominous role as this country's mysterious Fourth Force.
         Years ago, the War Plans scenario for a bipolar world visualized
      that the two great powers, the Soviet Union and the United States,
      would exchange massive nuclear blows.  The seats of government in
      both nations would be destroyed, along with their industrial
      capacities.  The armed forces of both nations would be crippled and
      there would be chaos because all major cities would have been
      annihilated and radioactive fallout would have rendered enormous
      areas uninhabitable.  It was believed then--and may still be--that
      the war would be won by the nation that could pull itself together
      fastest after the initial exchange and put a force into the other
      country for the purpose of control and reorganization.
         In the 1940s Washington came up with a War Plan that called for
      the creation of mobile, airlifted forces with global capability
      that could be dispatched immediately to areas in the Soviet Union
      where damage and radioactivity would be minimal following nuclear
      war.  These forces would have the ability to form a military
      government and establish a communications system in the devastated
      areas.
         But one link in the plan had to be created *before* the nuclear
      exchange.  Networks of agents had to be in place in "safe zones" of
      the Soviet Union to form the nucleus of any command-and-control
      system that would be established.  Furthermore, the designation of
      the safe zones was a function of top-level war plans and was
      determined by the prepositioning, during peacetime, of CIA agents
      as well as Russians in the Soviet Union working for the CIA.  While
      the military was pondering this problem, the CIA came onto the
      scene.  The United States Army had had experience in military
      government during World War II and it had done a good job,
      especially in Italy after the Germans were defeated and in Japan
      under General Douglas MacArthur.  The Office of Strategic Services
      had been close to the civil affairs and military government
      functions and was a precursor of the CIA;  so the military turned
      to the fledgling CIA for help with its World Plan.
         At that time the CIA was assisting with the administration and
      questioning of tens of thousands of defectors from eastern Europe.
      The Agency had countless leads into eastern Europe and some, if
      exploited properly, would even stretch into Russia.  Thus the CIA
      came to take an active part in this supersecret war planning.  The
      Agency established a presence in the Pentagon and in the major
      United States military headquarters all over the world.  The Agency
      had available hundreds of skilled former military men.  Most
      retained their reserve status while others were given equivalent
      rank.  Some CIA personnel carried letters of authority that gave
      them rank above that of any three-star general or admiral.  The CIA
      was moving in.
         In the War Plans game the CIA is scheduled to play the actual
      role of the Fourth Force--the name given to it by the Pentagon.
      The CIA Fourth Force would serve under the Supreme Allied Command.
      The Army, Navy, and Air Force would have paramount roles in time of
      all-out war.  Then the CIA, the Fourth Force, would go into action.
      This Fourth Force was not an intelligence force;  the military,
      even before the days of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which was
      created in 1961, was extremely jealous of its own intelligence
      capability and did not want any CIA meddling.  But it readily
      accepted the CIA as the Fourth Force in a paramilitary sense, for
      duty during wartime.
         The CIA, under Allen Dulles, put exceptionally able operatives
      into each military headquarters.  The over-worked planning staffs
      found these extra hands ready and eager to help with any odd task.
      Such offices as Subsidiary Plans, Special Operations, Psychological
      Warfare, and Unconventional Warfare began to spring up and they
      were all loaded with "helpful" CIA men.
         The law that created the CIA specifically prohibited the Agency
      from building up forces for clandestine operations.  The Secretary
      of Defense in the late 1940s, Louis Johnson, had informed the
      Director of Central Intelligence that if the Agency needed military
      equipment it would have to pay cash for whatever it ordered.  In
      those days the CIA budget was small, so this order effectively
      controlled any undue clandestine use of military equipment in
      foreign countries by the CIA.
         President Eisenhower continued the policy.  One of the old
      Clandestine Operations documents known as NSCID 10/2 was updated to
      NSC 5412/2 and it set forth limitations concerning the role the CIA
      could play in clandestine operations.  In the margin of one of the
      master copies of NSC 5412/2 Eisenhower had noted in his own
      handwriting that nothing was to be given to the CIA that would
      enable it to create a force that would permit it to operate over
      any lengthy period of time, or to be able to operate in such a
      manner that the operation would not remain "covert."  In other
      words, clandestine operations were to be small and "one time"--so
      said Eisenhower.
         But the CIA was gathering power as the Fourth Force.  It began
      in Europe, where military maneuvers were to be held in Germany.
      All the armed forces, including the Fourth Force, were to take
      part.  Each service had its own equipment, established by the War
      Plan.
         As the exercise took shape and the military forces began to
      prepare for their roles, the CIA asked for weapons, trucks, radios,
      jeeps, and other items it would need to "play" Fourth Force.  This
      was a problem.  The military couldn't fund the CIA and the CIA
      could not go to Congress itself and ask for military equipment on a
      permanent basis.  The military forces came up with a solution.  The
      Army, Navy, and Air Force all created "phony" CIA cover units.
      Then they let the CIA "equip" these units according to the War Plan
      and in time the CIA acquired a huge stockpile of military
      equipment, even aircraft, ostensibly for its formal Fourth Force
      mission.
         Over the next few years the CIA amassed more and more equipment.
      Its phony Army, Navy, and Air Force units did not have the usual
      "equipment lists" or "tables of equipment" that other United States
      military organizations had;  so the Agency had in effect an open-
      ended horn of plenty.  Warehouses in England, Germany, Libya,
      Okinawa, and the Philippines, among others, were bulging with CIA-
      owned military hardware.
         Then, since all of this had cost nothing, the CIA began to use
      its money to buy foreign weapons.  For example, the CIA bought
      boatloads of Russian, Czechoslovak, Polish, and other weapons that
      the Israelis had captured from the Egyptian army in the 1956 war.
      The CIA soon had substantial stockpiles of foreign equipment.
         By the mid-1950s the CIA was ready to exploit its new
      capability.  It turned its back on hard-core Soviet and East
      European targets and began to operate secretly in the realm of the
      Third World.  When it wanted to equip a rebel cabal to overthrow
      some government the CIA did not have to ask anyone for weaponry.
      It could ask the Air Force for planes to fly "training equipment"
      into some country;  and the next thing anyone knew a well-equipped
      and well-financed rebel force would be rising up against an "enemy"
      government.
         The United States armed forces, meanwhile, had no idea how much
      equipment the CIA had gleaned from them.  I recall in 1962 telling
      Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
      that the CIA had "hundreds of military units and that they were all
      well armed and equipped."  He said he didn't know it had become as
      extensive as that.  Lemnitzer--a member of the recent Rockefeller
      CIA Commission--turned to the Commandant of the Marine Corps,
      General David M. Shoup, and asked if the Marines had such units.
      Shoup replied that they had a few, and added:  "This must explain
      why I was asked by an Army unit on Okinawa for 14,000 rifles one
      day.  I never could figure out why the Army needed 14,000 Marine
      rifles.  Now I realize that I gave them to a CIA `Army' unit."
      Those rifles found their way to Meo tribesmen fighting for the CIA
      in its private war in Laos.
         This Fourth Force technique was carried so far that it was the
      CIA that actually selected and purchased the first M-16 rifles.
      The CIA had aircraft of its own, types that it concealed in the
      military inventory even when the services had none like them--such
      as the L-28, the U-5, and the RB-69.
         The CIA sent the first sizable units of large helicopters into
      South Vietnam and moved in thousands of men under military cover to
      maintain them.  These concentrations of men, ostensibly maintaining
      helicopters and no more, became early targets for the Viet Cong.
      They eventually had to be protected by United States military
      forces that might not have been sent if the CIA had not required
      them to protect its huge bases, a fact that does much to explain
      the early phases of the escalation of the Vietnam war.
         The CIA has the world's largest private airline.  It is
      generally known as Air America and it is part of the Pacific
      Corporation.  But Air America itself has on occasion had more than
      one hundred subordinate affiliates all over the world.  At one time
      Air America had more than four thousand men each on two separate
      bases.  Of course, these bases appeared to be U.S. military bases
      and needed protection, which in turn involved the assignment of
      regular military forces.
         Four government panels have been studying the CIA, plodding
      through stacks of irrelevant bits and pieces, swamped by
      titillating tidbits that lead nowhere.  None of them knows about
      the Fourth Force, and they probably would not be able to identify
      and understand it if they found it.
         The Fourth Force is a major power.  It has been used to start
      major wars and is at full strength today.  The beginnings of Fourth
      Force activity may already be seen in the Middle East, and when the
      CIA is ready, action will begin there.  This is the real CIA.
         The Rockefeller Commission did not look into this because it had
      been penetrated on behalf of the CIA by David Belin, its chief
      counsel and former counsel of the Warren Commission.  In fact,
      Belin still reports to the CIA.  The Senate committee will not get
      into this because it has been penetrated by its chief counsel,
      William G. Miller.  Miller was recruited by the CIA in the Fifties
      when he was in Harvard, and the CIA assisted him by getting him a
      Foreign Service assignment in Iran from where he regularly reported
      to the CIA.
         The House committee investigating the CIA will not get into this
      subject because its leadership has never really wanted a thorough
      investigation of the CIA.  The committee is little known and it
      will not dig deeply.  This committee is working on government
      reorganization activities and is administered by Presidential aide
      Donald Rumsfeld.  This top committee has an active and important
      subcommittee on the Reorganization of the CIA.  The CIA may be
      reorganized, but there is little chance that any of the present
      investigations will get deeply and significantly into the Fourth
      Force concept.
         With the end of effective operations in Laos, Cambodia, and
      South Vietnam, the CIA will be shifting its apparatus from
      southeast Asia back to the United States.  Then it will become
      embroiled in some small conflagration which will rage into an
      inferno until we are again at war.  This is inevitable.  And the
      fires the CIA ignites are costly to extinguish.  The most recent
      one--the Vietnam war--cost $220-billion and 58,000 American lives.



--
                                             daveus rattus   

                                   yer friendly neighborhood ratman

                               KOYAANISQATSI

   ko.yan.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language)  n.  1. crazy life.  2. life
       in turmoil.  3. life out of balance.  4. life disintegrating.  
         5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.
