A Special Operation
                                  Part II



               The Existence of a High Cabal or Power Elite

     Ratcliffe: You write in the Freedom magazine articles [which
     became the initial "raw material" for the 1992 JFK book] about
     this High Cabal (others have called them the Power Elite or the
     Cryptocracy): this group that people like Buckminster Fuller and
     Winston Churchill have referred to as very real and influential
     existing largely behind the scenes. We were discussing the other
     day the significance of the philosophy that derived from knowing
     that the world was finite, with the explorations of Magellan, who
     wanted to keep going west to see what he would find -- and how
     such knowledge formed institutions like the Haileybury College and
     then the British East India Trade Company. Can you reiterate that
     marvelous description -- your sense of this changing world view
     once it was known that the world was no longer flat, that it was a
     closed unit.

     Prouty: There is no shortage of experienced writers who, for
     various reasons, allude repeatedly to, I like Churchill's term
     best, a "High Cabal." This is attributed to Churchill by Lord
     Denning in his very good book, A Family Affair. Lord Denning
     corresponds to our Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the senior
     law officer in the United Kingdom. In the book he recounts a story
     about World War II and the heavy bombardment in England and in
     Europe. Denning states that his brother, who was an officer with
     British Naval Intelligence, was working on duty late at night in
     an underground subterranean area that was between Ten Downing
     Street and an underground shelter where Churchill used to stay
     during bombing attacks. The Navy, being as alert as ever, stocked
     this area where Commander Denning was working, with a few
     high-quality bottles of brandy.

     When, on many occasions, Churchill would walk through their
     office, the Commander would invite the Prime Minister to sit down
     and have a brandy. One particular night, after there had been a
     heavy bombardment on London, and they knew that Rotterdam was
     under attack, Churchill was sitting there sipping his brandy and
     he said, almost as if speaking to himself, "You know, an all-out
     battle on land, and heavy battles in the sea, and this total
     bombardment over Rotterdam and over London, the High Cabal is
     operating here". And he referred to this being the wishes of the
     High Cabal. Now unfortunately, Lord Denning doesn't go any further
     with the reminiscences of his brother. But maybe they didn't go
     any further. Maybe Churchill just said that much.

     I was at the Cairo Conference, where Churchill was. I was in his
     group; I was close enough to directly witness some of what was
     going on. I flew the British staff officers back and forth from
     where some of them stayed in Palestine during the Cairo Conference
     and talked with them a lot about the progress of the conference.
     Later I was at the Teheran Conference, where Churchill was. I
     lived across the street from Churchill when he was convalescing.
     (After these conferences he had a case of pneumonia in Marrakesh,
     Morocco.) Now I can't say that Churchill was any intimate of mine,
     but I was close enough to observe people that worked with him, and
     the military people who worked for him. I talked with them a lot.
     And we had the feeling that Churchill, certainly, is a senior
     person (as was Roosevelt, as was Stalin) in the world, but that
     there seems to be a level that maybe he listens to. Maybe this is
     what Denning was referring to -- because Churchill describes a
     High Cabal.

     He's not the only one. Buckminster Fuller, a rare individual, has
     spent more time, at the invitation of Congress, before
     Congressional hearings than any other individual, with the
     probable exception of Admiral Rickover, advising Congress on
     different issues relating to the government. But interestingly
     enough, he has spent more time in the Kremlin as an advisor to the
     Soviets than he has in our own Congress. He worked with President
     Kubitschek in setting up the new Brazil. A rare individual. A man
     who knows the world and knows the leaders of the world. He writes
     about a "power elite," and that the apparent leaders, as we see
     them throughout the world, are certainly national leaders, but
     they're not the top echelon, the High Cabal.

     In history you will find that the Chinese, as far back as 2,000
     years ago, speak of a High Cabal that they call the "Gentry" --
     and that the Chinese seem to have accepted that as a fact of life.
     Even though they had their emperors and their monarchs and
     leaders, they realized there's an echelon above that which directs
     some of the events that other people know nothing about. It's
     Fuller who hits the nail on the head. He says that the secret of
     the High Cabal is -- of course, it's control of power, but it is
     also the understanding that their most valuable asset is
     anonymity: that nobody can identify them. In that sense, you begin
     to talk, you begin to think: maybe they're just like angels or
     like ghosts, people say they're there, but, are they really?

     I don't think it's that. In fact, I think that perhaps what people
     think of in terms of ghosts or angels, may be the reality that
     there is an echelon within our world, a small structure, that does
     really determine how things go. And I wouldn't argue the point.
     Because in my own experience in more than 80 countries -- and I
     have talked directly to presidents of countries and people on
     their level -- I have this feeling that they're taking their
     instructions from some other place. Now that may be personal, but
     I notice it in the writings of others as well.

                 Magellan's Circumnavigation of the Globe:
                        The Philosophy That Derived
                     From Knowing the World Was Finite

     You wonder what is the source or the origin of this. I don't know
     how long we want to say mankind has been on Earth, but let's say
     30 or 40 thousand years -- maybe longer in certain manifestations,
     but we'll settle for that. Over this 30 or 40 thousand years,
     society has lived on an Earth that wasn't flat, wasn't round, all
     it was was an expanse. Because there weren't enough people to fill
     it up at any given location. They had no problem with space. They
     didn't even think about the word "property," in the sense of real
     property, real estate. They simply lived there.

     If hostility grew between two communes, two villages, one or the
     other would be forced to move a little bit. There's always some
     more space over there. And they weren't bothered with our
     retroactive view of that: that they had a flat-land approach and
     that we know the world is round and therefore they were pretty
     stupid. It wasn't that. It's just that they had another place to
     go. If they had to graze cattle, they'd move a little further. And
     if, on one of these moves, they ran into some other people they
     had never met before, then they accepted there were other people
     on Earth. But they were all on the same expanse. They didn't know
     whether the expanse was flat or curved or what it was.

     They did know that it came to a shoreline, that there were oceans.
     And they were prone to follow shorelines, as the South Asians did
     thousands of years ago as they progressed north across Bering
     Straits (which at that time was a land bridge), down through North
     America, and even into Central America. If you dig in the mummies'
     tombs, in the burial grounds of Peru, you will find that on their
     huacos -- the ancient bowls and jars that they made -- are figures
     of people who have slant eyes, Oriental eyes. That meant, when a
     person was making the jar, she made the jar in the image of the
     people that she knew -- with slanted eyes. They didn't know there
     were any other people.

     But, in all of this civilizing of mankind over these 30 or 40
     thousand years, there occurred finally an event that changed the
     entire prospect of their history. And we can't always say, "Well,
     they didn't have written history." Evidence from China is that
     their written history goes way back -- far, far back -- much more
     so than we think. But that's not all of it. History forms each
     generation as they remember the important things it distills. In
     the voyages around the world, navigators -- especially, we think,
     in the area of the islands of the South Pacific and around
     Indonesia and that area -- the navigators began to be able to find
     their way across the Pacific to other islands, to other lands, and
     then back again.

     The leading, most important people in those countries in those
     days were the navigators, because they could come and go, they
     could find their way. They knew the stars, is what it amounted to;
     they understood the winds. And gradually these navigators began to
     say that, perhaps we could go further around the world and keep
     going. This became a prospect -- something they could do -- like
     we think we can put a man on Mars and we know we can do it.

     In Portugal one of these navigators was named Magellan. He got in
     trouble somehow with his own government, or else he couldn't be
     supported by his own government and he went over to Spain. The
     Spanish king decided he would support Magellan's expedition in
     which he wanted to start out going to the west and keep going to
     the west -- which seemed like a good idea -- he wanted to try it
     anyway. Others had gone to the west, like Columbus, and they hit
     shore and turned around and came back, so that we found "India,"
     but he had only gone part way. But the people didn't have the idea
     in those days that they could keep going except going in a flat
     way, and when they hit land they figured they'd been there. They
     didn't think of the Earth in terms of a sphere. It's quite
     important.

     So, not only did the royalty of Spain agree to finance Magellan's
     voyage (it was several ships), but, interestingly enough, the
     bankers of Antwerp, in Belgium, poured money into this because
     they could see it as a means of taking over new lands, new wealth,
     gold, tin, silver, and all those spices and other trade goods. So
     they financed his trip, and three ships took off.

     Years later, in the same harbor back in Spain, one single ship
     named the Victoria returned. When the Victoria landed and they
     told how Magellan was killed while they were in the Philippines,
     they also reported that they had discovered new territories, all
     the way along their voyage. That they had gone west all the time
     and had completely circumnavigated the earth which must therefore
     be a round globe. There's one fact about a sphere that everybody
     knows: its surface is finite. If you have a basketball you can
     measure to the nth degree how much surface area it has. And if you
     have an 8,000-mile-diameter globe you can measure to the degree
     how much surface it has.

     This majestic realization changed the mind of man as a group, more
     than any other single event that happened in the 40,000 years
     we've been here. Because from that moment on, these bankers in
     Antwerp, and their associates, and the kings and queens of Europe,
     began to realize: If this earth is a sphere, it is then finite.
     And if it's finite, there's only so much land, there's only so
     much tin, so much gold, so much spice. And they looked at the
     world as something that belonged to them -- if they got there
     first.

                The Development of the East India Companies
                        and "Proprietary" Colonies

     This started a significant train of thought in the educated,
     financial, politically powerful groups of the world, particularly
     the European world. It was expressed most easily in the terms of
     the East India Company development. They had the British East
     India Company, the Dutch East India Company, there was a Spanish
     East India Company -- I think there were eight of them -- and,
     interestingly enough, there was a Russian East India Company. I
     forget what they called it, but the Russians explored the coast of
     Alaska and California. The Russians, in conjunction with shippers
     from Boston in the China trade, carried out a sea otter business
     (in the fur of sea otters) from California back to Canton, China,
     and on into Europe. It was one of the most valuable, one of the
     most profitable, sea ventures of the time.

     So all of these countries were doing this together. They all
     immediately set out to explore the world, to inventory it and to
     own it. The leaders in this were the British. And the British East
     India Company became dominant in this worldwide exploration. They
     achieved this dominance by their view that anything they
     discovered was theirs, and that the king could commission them to
     set up a proprietary colony -- wherever they discovered land -- a
     British proprietary colony. Now what that meant was, they could
     introduce their religion to the colony and their armies to the
     colony -- and then do business in the colony. But the word
     "colony" was not exactly accurate, because they used everything
     from total slaughter of the people they ran into to total
     friendship, depending on how they got along with those people.

     But their idea was whatever part of the world they went to was
     theirs. Property for the other guy was zero and property for them
     was total. As I said previously, in an earlier day the navigators
     were the senior elite people in the country. The elite people now
     became surveyors. If we think of history in that period, we ask
     ourselves: What was George Washington's business here in the
     United States? He was a trained surveyor. He worked for Lord
     Fairfax and other landowners solely because the king had granted
     them a charter, from London, to come to North America and take
     over land between one fix on the beach and another. Then have men
     like George Washington, with their surveying instruments, just
     draw lines heading for the west, not knowing where the Pacific
     Ocean was but going in that direction.

     The concept that everything in the world belonged to the East
     India Company (or, to the King of England, or the King of Holland,
     or the King of Germany) was really a strange development, arising
     from the realization that the Earth was spherical and therefore
     finite and that they must acquire property. Mankind was beginning
     to develop the concept of the ownership of property.

     This continued for a century or more until it became an enormously
     big business. These East India Companies were dominating countries
     like India, even countries like China. They were dominating North
     America, and so on, as they moved around the world. The British
     again led the others in training people for these jobs. They
     created a college, called Haileybury College, where they not only
     trained the people in the financial aspects of all this business
     work all over the world, but in military -- special military, you
     might say. They weren't trained to be world conquerors in the
     Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar mold; they were trained to
     run a constabulary, to control these countries they took over, and
     to help their business partners (in the East India Company) carry
     out their business enterprises in those countries.

     In addition to that, they trained missionaries. Because they soon
     realized that, in the rest of the world there was, from their
     point of view, no religion: they were all just pagans. This
     reminds me of the Vietnam days -- that any Vietnamese was a mere
     gook. Well here these people all over the world were mere pagans.
     And of course, you can't live in a world with pagans. You have to
     bring your missionaries and convert them to Christianity.

     So this became a role. And they used to go into these "proprietary
     colonies" with their missionary leaders first and try to
     peacefully set up, their arrangements for living with these
     people, for converting these people, and actually taking over
     their land and taking over their businesses. But if the missionary
     half of their business didn't work by itself (because they were
     overwhelming these people anyway with their strength and their
     power and their money and their imports), then they would bring in
     their military. So, one way or the other, they just took over land
     all over the world, took over business, took over people.

                 Inventorying Earth: Haileybury College
                  and the Roles of Malthus and Darwin

     In the process, their masters (the top people, the governor of the
     East India Company) realized that what they were really after was
     to learn what the assets of the entire Earth were. And in a most
     interesting development, they set up an economic studies
     department in the Haileybury College. Economics is not an old
     profession (not an old science, as some people want to call it).
     For Head of the Economics Department they installed a man named
     Thomas Malthus. The interesting fact was that Malthus was given
     the job of inventorying Earth -- an absolutely incomprehensible
     job when you figure that this happened at the turn of the century,
     about 1800 (1800, 1805, somewhere in there). The East India
     Company had been started around 1600. So for two centuries they'd
     been doing this work, preparing themselves for this business. They
     had become an extremely lucrative company. But now they were
     getting serious: they wanted to inventory Earth. And Malthus was
     given that job.

     As he progressed in this study, Malthus came up with his theory
     that the world was going to come to an end because mankind was
     increasing at a geometric rate and food was increasing at an
     arithmetic rate, and that mankind would overwhelm the production
     of food quantities not too far in the future. That was a necessary
     theory for these people in this East India Company because, as
     they inventoried Earth, it made it an incentive for them to have
     the food, to have the resources for themselves but not for the
     other people. It began to create almost what we have in the Cold
     War today: an "us or them" mentality. The more friction there is
     in an "us or them" situation, the more motivation there is on your
     side to get the job done, including armies, missionaries, and all
     the rest of the powerful tools we have.

     This moved along for another 30 or 40 years, and among the men
     that Malthus sent out to help inventory Earth was Charles Darwin.
     Darwin went all over Latin America and beyond, studying birds,
     butterflies, and everything he found and then he came back. He
     began to report that there are all sorts of life growing in and on
     this Earth. And he came back with picture books of all the
     different birds he found, the fish that he found, and a great deal
     else, from all over the world. Then he began to organize these
     species of the world.

     As he began to tell this to his colleagues in the East India
     Company and at Haileybury, they began to get formulate the
     question of what, after all, is the origin of species? Where do
     they come from, and what keeps them going, and how do we get one
     species here and another one there? We know that Darwin wrote this
     book called The Origin of Species. The interesting point is that
     he was rather reluctant to write this book. He was a true
     professional. He saw his business in certain terms, but he knew he
     hadn't proved anything about the origin of species; he didn't want
     to call it Origin of Species. In fact if I remember, it's about
     page 53 before he gets into that part of his book. But it's an
     interesting point. He did proclaim that, among all the species, or
     among the internal groupings within the species, those that were
     fittest survived and those that weren't presumably didn't survive.
     It was an interesting observation that he came up with.

     Looking at the situation of the East India Company, these two men
     played an important role -- a very important role for them in
     their day and for us 150-200 years later. The first conclusion was
     that mankind is increasing too fast and food is going to give out.
     Second, in the event there is this conflict and that we can't all
     live, the fittest are going to survive. If you put the two
     together and think about it, what it means is if you have the
     better army, the better business, more power, and your people can
     conquer the others -- even to the point of genocide -- that's
     perfectly all right. Because they're going to die anyway and,
     because they died, they certainly weren't the fittest, we're the
     fittest. What it did was to begin to inculcate in the minds of
     these leaders, these top leaders and these extremely wealthy
     people, that there's nothing wrong with genocide. Furthermore,
     they had their own missionaries right along with them to show that
     all this is perfectly all right: this was the plan, this was the
     way the world was made.

     It's startling to see what conclusions were drawn from the
     realization that the Earth is spherical, therefore finite; that it
     needed to be inventoried, that certain powers needed to control
     all of the property of Earth. As we progress through the years,
     we're talking about days that aren't too far behind us. In all the
     thirty to forty thousand years of mankind, we're only talking
     about that narrow little space between 1600 and 2000 -- 400 years.
     And since new ideas spread very slowly, the first 200 of those 400
     years really don't count for much. Those were the years when they
     were exploring, finding the Earth they didn't even know existed,
     getting used to the fact that you could go to the west coast of
     California from England, and so on -- that there was a route, that
     you could make the trip. That took about 200 years.

     By the time they got that organized, then they got themselves
     involved in the Napoleonic Wars of Europe, much of which had to do
     with this business of conquering Earth, inventorying Earth. And
     you're not too far from World War I, and you're not too far from
     World War II. In other words, what I'm saying is: this cycle is
     not over. We haven't finished the inventory of Earth, we haven't
     finished who owns what.

     But we have defined the idea of property. Property now, right down
     to the last inch -- the middle of Tokyo, a square foot of ground
     is selling for thousands of dollars. There are sections of this
     that are quite interesting. I read in the newspaper not too long
     ago that some property in Africa had been taken from native groups
     and they decided to give some of it back. And the section of that
     property was called the Jesuit Square. As I recall what I read
     (and I wish I had the figures here), I think the Jesuit Square is
     about 15,000 square miles. In other words, as these missionaries
     moved ahead in this inventory process and just assumed ownership
     of this land, they were taking over so much land that 15,000
     square miles was just a square. Like, what do we call a square
     mile? -- 640 acres is a square mile, a one-mile square, isn't it?

     This figure is the same figure that was used when the Spanish East
     India Company began to go into what we now call New Mexico,
     Arizona, and Southern California. In the old land titles it still
     speaks of Jesuit Square. This was a formal application of the
     missionary role on into these so-called unexplored countries.
     Everything was from the point of view of Europe. The fact that
     there were hundreds of thousands of people living somewhere was
     not acknowledged. It was called "unexplored." They simply ignored
     the fact those people were there; it wasn't explored by British.
     Like the discovery of America. We keep saying Columbus discovered
     America -- and the British explorers came, and so on to the
     Pilgrims coming to America. My god, America was overrun with
     people! But the Europeans discovered America. That's part of the
     overwhelming significance of this discovery that the Earth was a
     sphere.

     At present we are living in what might be called the apex of this
     big curve. It certainly isn't over. We're still operating under
     the principles of Haileybury College -- Malthus and Darwin -- even
     though both of them are ridiculous. It's been proved today that
     our ability to produce food is 70 times greater per farmer than it
     was in the time of Malthus. It's been proved that Darwin never did
     discover the origin of the species -- no scientist has ever
     described the origin of any species. But those two doctrines were
     implanted by the East India Company's mind-control techniques so
     thoroughly that we still believe them.

     It was in 1862 that Lord Oliphant came back from his job as the
     ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in Turkey, imbued with the spirit
     that something happens to men's minds in seances. In England he
     then created the British Society of Psychic Research, which soon
     took over most of the higher positions in the British government.
     In fact Lord Balfour, for over 30 years, was either the head of
     the British Society of Psychic Research or one of his relatives or
     close associates was. And it's the American wing of the British
     Society of Psychic Research which created Stanford University and
     the University of Indiana among others. For instance, Leland
     Stanford, the great railroad man on the West Coast, claims that he
     was in a seance talking to his dead son when his dead son told him
     to create a major university on the West Coast, and there we have
     Stanford University.

     That's something of a humorous little story until you put it in
     this context. That these enormously powerful leaders, stemming
     from the East India Company, got into this psychic research arena
     and even began to impress upon the society of the United States,
     South Africa -- other parts of the world -- their own beliefs in
     the power of seances and in the power of mind control.

     So to wind this up with a little anecdote: the governor of the
     East India Company in Bombay, India, was a man named Elihu Yale --
     Eli Yale. Yale heard that a small college in New England,
     specifically in Connecticut, was having trouble getting started.
     He donated something like $10,000 (which was a lot of money in
     those days) to help found the college. And we have Yale University
     (comparable to Harvard) as a result of a gift from the East India
     Company, from Yale in Bombay, India. In his offices in Bombay
     (which still exist), on the wall there is the flag of the British
     East India Company. That flag has seven red bars and six white
     bars. In the corner it has a blue square, and in that square (or
     rectangle) is the emblem of the East India Company.

     When the Bostonians attacked the ship Dartmouth and threw the tea
     in Boston Harbor at the Boston Tea Party, they took the flag down
     off the Dartmouth. It was the East India flag with the red and
     white stripes and the blue rectangle. They saved it as a memento
     of that battle. When George Washington went to Boston to assume
     command of the armies of the rebellion against England, he asked
     Betsy Ross to take the emblem off the flag and to put stars in its
     place. All Betsy Ross did that night was not create a flag. She
     simply snipped out the East India emblem and put in 13 little
     white stars. And the American flag is the East India flag. So when
     you hear people of what you might call "ancestral backgrounds" in
     this country demanding that we pledge allegiance to the flag, you
     may sometimes wonder if in their seances they don't see the East
     India flag, instead of the American flag, as the driving force.

     They certainly did in the case of Cecil Rhodes, who became the
     controller of all of the South African area, and a
     multimillionaire in his day. It was Cecil Rhodes who decided to
     send emissaries of his own to this country so that he could be
     sure that the teachings of the East India Company, and of
     Haileybury College, and of Malthus and Darwin, would be properly
     inculcated into the minds of Americans, by selecting Rhodes
     scholars year after year, and having them go to British colleges
     where they could then come back into our society and become
     leaders of the events.

     All you have to do is look at the historical record to see that
     Cecil Rhodes's plans were carried out very well. Cecil Rhodes,
     again, was motivated by the same East India Company philosophy
     that since the world was a sphere, you had to get property. If you
     could get the property you would then own the world. And that is
     their driving force.

     Ratcliffe: Pursuing one more step -- and wrapping this all up in
     the next hour -- your last discussions on the British East India
     trade company and their way of influencing thought exerted a
     central influence on the way people thought about things and
     continue to think about things.

                     Two Books: The End of Economic Man
                          and The Road To Teheran

     We were talking about some books the other day and I'd like to
     touch on two that seem particularly relevant. One you mentioned is
     by Peter Drucker called The End of Economic Man, written in the
     early thirties but not published until 1938 or '39. Since then he
     has become synonymous with the idea of management and capitalistic
     economics. Could you talk a bit about that?

     Prouty: This is very interesting because most of us know Peter
     Drucker as an advisor and consultant to the biggest businesses in
     this country. He's synonymous with big business, with free
     enterprise, with multinational corporations and he just has a new
     book out and the New York Times scrupulously reviews many of the
     books he has written and overlooks entirely his first book which
     is The End of Economic Man.

     Peter Drucker I believe is an Austrian, schooled in Germany and
     Austria, who grew up in the years during the growth of the Nazi
     Party in Germany, and I believe -- I'm not absolutely sure -- but
     I believe his family was Jewish. During that era, as a student in
     their major universities, he began to put together his idea that
     this Nazism that was growing under Hitler would destroy forever
     economic man. And his family left Germany and Austria, as many
     did, and went to England where he published this book, The End of
     Economic Man.

     His premise has been made by others as well, but I don't think any
     have stated it as clearly as he has: that what the Germans were
     doing was taking the German society of post World War I (when most
     people wanted no more war) and the Germany of the Weimar Republic
     -- reasonably democratic in terms of Germany anyway -- and this
     Nazism began to turn the German people into various classes of
     society most resembling a military structure, captains, majors,
     colonels, generals and so on. So that everything in Germany was
     being militarized -- boy scouts were militarized, girl scouts were
     militarized, everything was militarized, and it was all being done
     with the money and the approval of the very powerful and wealthy
     people.

     He goes into this in great detail. I can't recommend the book
     highly enough. Everybody should read it because he not only says
     this is what destroyed Germany, but that it's replication in any
     other country, England or the United States, would destroy those
     countries. I think anyone who reads The End of Economic Man today
     is going to think Peter Drucker was writing about the last decade
     of the United States as though next year was going to be the
     beginning of American Nazism or the equal of it. The two things
     fit hand in glove, but his book was written in 1939 not 1989.
     Difference in years notwithstanding, no one should omit that book.
     It's most important and so many things we are doing today appear
     to be running along that same current. We have war on poverty, we
     have war in the streets, we have war against AIDS, we have battles
     of this, we have everybody carrying automatic weapons up and down
     the streets -- that's what he was talking about. So read the book.

     Ratcliffe: Militarize even the war on drugs which seems to
     threaten so much of our --

     Prouty: Everything is a war, not just a program to try to promote
     an anti-drug mind-set -- everything is a war, as though war was
     exactly the way we ought to organize druggists and policemen and
     school teachers as majors and colonels and generals. And the
     students ought to all wear uniforms. This is what it was all about
     but I shouldn't talk too much about this because Drucker says this
     so well I want you to read Drucker's words and not my copy of his
     words. He describes it best; it becomes frightening when you read
     the book, there is only one way to think about it.

     Ratcliffe: The other book we discussed was something written by
     Foster Rhea Dulles, another one of the Dulles brothers.

     Prouty: No, this is a mystery to me. I have a very good book about
     the Dulles family that speaks about everybody in the current
     Dulles family that we know of: John Foster, Allen Dulles, his
     sister Eleanor, their father and mother and her family and all
     that sort of thing. This man Foster Rhea Dulles is not mentioned
     anywhere and I have cross-referenced through every book I can
     locate, including Who's Who and Writers in America, and I don't
     find Foster Rhea Dulles. Even as a pseudonym, a nom de plume type
     of identity, I don't find that.

     But the book is remarkable because it is entitled The Road To
     Teheran. It was written in either '45 or '46 and Teheran is the
     Teheran Conference of December '43. In this writer's mind he
     starts with American history back in the Revolutionary War, shows
     how closely Americans and Russians were related. For instance,
     John Quincy Adams was our ambassador, or at least our designate,
     to the court of Catherine the Great and Alexander back in Russia.
     They travelled to Leningrad, or Petrograd then, and their
     objectives were to open trade between United States and the Soviet
     Union and we did have an elaborate trade system. The shipping
     interests of Boston were widespread -- one of the most important
     trade routes they had was to the Soviet Union, or to then Russia,
     old Mother Russia.

     Dulles follows this through in a very interesting section in the
     book regarding the fact that the Russians had moved across the
     Bering Straits into Alaska (only along the coast, they had no
     interest apparently in Alaska at that time), down the coast of
     Western Canada as it is now, and down into what is today
     California. On the coast of California you can still see old
     Russian buildings preserved in some of the Park areas. He points
     out that the Russians who had come to those places were doing
     exactly as Jacob Astor's people were: they were hunting for fur
     and they were becoming as wealthy in their area as Jacob Astor was
     here in the United States as a great fur trader. The fur they
     traded in was the sea otter.

     Interestingly the Russians who went down the California coast went
     there by dog sled and walking, and their trade was carried out by
     the shipping firms all the way from Boston. The ships would travel
     from Boston to the California coast, pick up the sea otter skins
     by the boat load and move them into the markets, some in Asia and
     mostly in Europe. He puts in the book that in one ship load they
     would make between $300,000 and $400,000 profit. Of course three
     or four hundred thousand dollars in the 1700's is the same as tens
     of millions of dollars today.

     The interesting point was that the Americans and the Russians were
     working in complete harmony. There was no contest between them.
     The Russians lived on the west coast, Americans lived and hunted
     on the west coast, and they were for all intents and purposes
     friendly.

     The point here is that our history with the Russians has been
     friendly for years. He brings this history back into Civil War,
     when the Russians refused -- no first of all during the
     Revolutionary War when the Russians refused to help the British.
     They would not provide Cossacks (their cavalry) to help the
     British against the Americans. Which means they were friendly to
     America. In the Civil War, the same thing. They would not play a
     role. In fact, the Russians tried to provide equipment to American
     ships to support the Union forces in the Civil War. Then up to
     modern times he has some interesting views of our relationship
     with Russia initially during the Bolshevik revolution which was
     then overthrown when Lenin began to take power.

     The views as he presents them as history don't exactly coincide
     with this strong Communist bias that we've had. But remember he
     writes this in the forties when the Soviets were our allies during
     the war. As he carries this up to the Teheran Conference he more
     or less draws the conclusion that the agreements at Teheran were
     natural agreements -- that America and Russia had more frequently
     been allies or friends or business associates than adversaries.
     And he leaves the book at 1944, the war ended in 1945, and we had
     the anti-communist brainwashing era in the late forties, but
     that's after his book.

     So this is a very necessary book for people who want to understand
     the relationship between our two countries as we come into the
     present era and begin to understand each other more closely. It's
     not the equivalent of the book called The Great Conspiracy written
     by Alfred Kahn but it is as important. I think The Great
     Conspiracy in 1946, with a rousing introduction by Senator Pepper,
     is an even better explanation of American and Russian interests
     with an unusual understanding of the intrigues from England and
     Germany that were involved in the Bolshevik Revolution and the
     fighting after that, even to the days after World War I when we
     had American troops in Vladivostok and events like that and what
     it was all about.

     If we don't read books like The Great Conspiracy or The Road to
     Teheran , it is very difficult to understand this whole era of
     anti-communism which was more or less impressed upon the American
     people. There was no evidence that this was really the state of
     affairs except it is the traditional situation that any group in
     power in any nation has to have an enemy. For reasons that are not
     clearly understood, immediately after World War II it was decided
     that we had to have an enemy and that communism was it. Since the
     enemy was communism Russia and China without any other definition,
     became the enemy. And we've been brainwashed since. That may be
     changing today or it may not be changing, but I think it is
     because we also realize that military-type war is probably
     outdated now on account of nuclear weapons and that warfare from
     here on will be economic warfare. It will be just as tough, it
     will kill just as many people, it will cost just as much money,
     but it will be economic warfare.

                     The Changing Nature of Warfare:
                  From a Military to an Economic Basis

     Ratcliffe: A question occurred to me the other day regarding this
     sense of yours about the change of warfare. As you indicated, you
     feel the military industrial complexes' influence and
     pervasiveness will lessen as the new economic warfare intensifies.
     Particularly in the area of energy as it's currently going now, as
     well as in the area of food where you feel will become prevalent.
     What do you think will happen with respect to the organization
     currently in place that you define as the Secret Team that seems
     to operate in the industry of military production and trade.

     Prouty: I think we have seen an absolutely perfect example of what
     we're talking about in what is called Arab oil embargo. In the
     decade leading up to 1973, the price of a barrel of oil that was
     more or less worldwide had been $1.70. If you wanted to buy a
     100,000 barrels of oil you paid 100,000 times a $1.70. And you got
     the oil. At that price oil was profitable and the oil companies
     were making enormous profits. The producers like Saudi Arabia and
     Iraq and Iran and Russia were making profits with their oil. And
     then all of a sudden they decided they were going to increase the
     price of oil and by "they" I mean the High Cabal, the people in
     great money.

     It's nothing but a money deal, its nothing but a war, a war like
     that fought in Vietnam -- it's for money, there's nothing else. We
     didn't gain a thing except we spent between $250 -- $500 billion
     dollars fighting a war in Vietnam.

     And overnight, the price of oil went up. There was a battle
     between the Israelis and the Arabs. The story goes that the Arabs
     as a result of that war declared an embargo on a shipment of oil
     from the Middle East to the rest of the world and that made the
     shortage of gasoline in the streets and we could not get gasoline
     at our favorite gas pumps and we had to pay more and more and
     more.

     We should look back at that carefully. The Arab-Israeli war was
     not conclusive. The Arabs gained on the first few days way into
     Israeli territory and then a couple of weeks later the Israelis
     came back and went quite a way into the Egyptian territory and
     then the war just ended. It was inconclusive. But all of a sudden
     the Arabs, according to the press, signalled an embargo on oil.
     Now that's the most ridiculous thing in the world because the only
     income these Arabs have is the sale of oil, and furthermore the
     oil that they produce comes from the ground all by itself under
     pressure from the earth. They don't have to pump it, they had no
     great big problem with supplying oil.

     As a matter of fact I can show you copies of the Congressional
     Record in which oil experts from the Middle East reported that
     exactly at this time of the Arab oil embargo, the storage tanks at
     the Arab facilities whether it was Kuwait, or Iraq, or Saudi
     Arabia were overloaded and bursting with oil waiting for ships to
     come.

     A few years later I was asked as a representative of American
     Railroad System to attend a conference in London at the Chartered
     Institute of Transport. Among the seminar groups that I met with
     there was one on petroleum transportation. A gentleman came into
     that room and lectured to only 8 of us who had come to that class
     -- I was very glad I went to it -- and one of the Englishmen in
     the room nudged me as the speaker was coming into the room and
     said, do you know this gentleman? I said no. He said, this man is
     a multi-billionaire ship owner.

     It occurred to me and has since then, why would a
     multi-billionaire (in pounds by the way, more than dollars), want
     to come into a room with 8 people and lecture on petroleum
     transportation? Though of course a very good reason was that it
     was all being recorded and would be printed in a book later and so
     his words would become part of the record and he was very proud of
     what he had been doing.

     What he told us was the same thing as these people reporting to
     the Congress: that there was no shortage of oil. That what
     happened was a very well planned system was applied through the
     tanker industry, and they arbitrarily and absolutely controlled
     the movement of oil by not picking it up, until the price was
     right.

     Now in 1973, the Middle East produced and sold 15 billion dollars
     worth of oil. By 1980, the same Middle East produced and sold 300
     billion dollars worth of oil. The quantity of oil they produced
     was not much different. The cost of producing it was not much
     different. But the sale price was 15 billion dollars in '73 and 7
     years later it was 300 billion dollars. I think anyone can
     understand that for $285 billion profit it's worth doing almost
     anything in this world today. And that accounts for the Arab oil
     embargo, the shortage at the fuel pumps, and the fact that we
     Americans are paying $1.30 a gallon for gas when we used to pay 29
     cents a gallon for gas.

     This kind of control is the new form of warfare. Now petroleum is
     not an absolute necessity of life. Energy is, and petroleum is a
     major factor in energy, but it is close enough to being a
     necessity so that this shortage of oil, this control of oil,
     really hurt people all over the world. And especially in the
     leading nations like ours because overnight they increased one of
     the major expenses we have in the cost of running an automobile.
     So this kind of war has as its battlefield the streets of America,
     the streets of Paris, the streets of London, where our automobiles
     are; where our trains run; where our airplanes fly.

     It is a completely different battle for enormous profits and the
     control that those profits produce. Because once the price of oil
     goes up, the price of coal goes up, the price of natural gas goes
     up, the price of food goes up, and everything else. The cost of
     trucking becomes higher, and most of our food is moved by trucks.
     So that when the price of oil went up from 30 cents a gallon up to
     $1.50 a gallon, all the rest of the price levels went up on the
     tide of oil. All escalated with the price of oil. And the cost of
     just plain living, day by day, escalated with the price of oil,
     and that price of oil was controlled by superpowers -- superpowers
     control those industries. The catalytic force in that was
     something as simple as the shipping industry. There is no way to
     get around the shipping industry.

     This was also being explained at these meetings in London. That
     traditionally, oil from Iraq, the old oil fields of Kirkuk and
     Mosul, had travelled through a huge system of pipelines that went
     from Iraq, through Jordan, and to the port of Haifa in what was
     then Palestine. When the country of Israel was formed, one of the
     first things the Israelis did, for reasons that are not recorded,
     is close the pipeline terminus at Haifa. And Iraqi oil could not
     leave Iraq for the Mediterranean coast and for Europe. Most Iraqi
     oil is sold and consumed in Europe.

     There are 8 other pipelines that extend from Iraq to the
     Mediterranean. They go to the Port of Sidon in Lebanon, and other
     ports northward all the way up to Syrian ports. We have seen those
     pipelines made dry by the Israeli attack on Lebanon. And we wonder
     why Israel should even bother to attack Lebanon, why Syria should
     be attacking Lebanon, and why poor old neutral Lebanon, which is
     nothing but the market garden basket of Europe, is brought to its
     knees by a perpetual war until we realize that war causes the
     pipelines from the Middle East to Europe to go dry. This forces
     the oil onto the ships and under the controls that have been
     devised by the shipping cartels. This is a fact of life. This is
     happening right now today.

     The fighting in Lebanon is to keep the pipelines dry. The fighting
     between the Arabs and the Israelis is to keep the oil pipelines
     dry. Its not religious, it's not political, the Arabs have no
     choice. The Israelis receive 2-1/2 -- 3 billion dollars aid money
     from us a year, which is perhaps payment for their assistance. The
     Egyptians receive 2-1/2 -- 3 billion dollars from us -- the most
     foreign aid money we pay to any countries in the world, are to
     Israel and to Egypt. How does Egypt earn its money? It meters the
     Suez canal to oil and no oil goes through the Suez canal. So the
     movement of oil causes the tide of prices to rise all over the
     world, and part of the device is to keep the pipelines of the
     Middle East dry.

     During the Iraq-Iran war, the Iraqis even attempted to build a
     pipeline through Turkey. They were forced so much to export oil,
     that they were exporting, I believe, almost a million barrels of
     oil a day by truck through Turkey. Now, that's not profitable.
     That adds a terrible cost to oil. They couldn't get it down the
     river through Abadan because their Persian Gulf ports had been
     destroyed. The Iranians couldn't get oil out of Iran, their ports
     had been destroyed. They were bargaining with Turkey to run a
     pipeline across Turkey out of Iran, and again billions of dollars
     being spent on that pipeline, which raises the price of oil beyond
     its economic levels. So the war between Iraq and Iran was simply
     to create a shortage of oil from those two countries which would
     create a higher price because of the lesser amount of oil
     available around the world.

     It's this kind of economic control of a major commodity, oil, that
     is the new type of warfare between nations on earth and we are
     going to see more of this because it produces such enormous
     profits. When the Middle East was making $300 billion in 1980 on
     the oil it exported, that represented about 40% of the world's
     total, meaning the rest of the world was getting maybe $400
     billion for selling its oil. Oil that only 7 years earlier would
     have sold for $16 to $18 billion. The profits are enormous. They
     are unbelievable.

           Human History and the Composition of the High Cabal

     Ratcliffe: I'd like you to discuss more of what you mentioned
     before regarding your sense of the High Cabal as a unit or group
     originating perhaps more from an Oriental base of historical roots
     rather than from a European base. You were telling me the other
     day about this story of the Chinese travellers who went to the
     Middle East to study the knowledge of the Arabic people and their
     whole approach in the way they ran their exploration and your
     sense of the High Cabal originating in an Oriental cultural basis.

     Prouty: We are so prone to study history in a linear fashion from
     the United States we go back to England, we go back to France and
     Germany. We go to Rome, we go to Greece, back to the Middle East
     and to Babylon. And it ends there as though the world began there.
     If you asked 90 out of 100 Americans where Adam and Eve were born,
     or appeared, they would say the Middle East. Because almost every
     formal study of history trickles back that way as though Asia, or
     Russia, or Indonesia didn't exist. There were no people there.
     Africa is a great big nothing in terms of history.

     Just as a little clue, I was in Kano, in the heart of Nigeria one
     day. It happened to be one of their celebration days, and there
     were black men, leaders of Kano, riding horses with coats of
     linked mail on the horses. And the men were wearing coats of mail
     armor just like the old medieval knights of yore, like King
     Arthur's men. I asked some of the people standing there as this
     parade went by, "Where did these come from, Hollywood, or
     something like that?" And they said, "No, don't you know?" And a
     very fine young man sat me down and told me that hundreds and
     hundreds of years before, the remnants of a lost Crusade, medieval
     people from Europe, had wandered into Africa and were defeated and
     captured and that these natives had these original old coats of
     mail of the horses and of their riders. Now, in Nigeria, they
     never had horses, they wouldn't need coats of mail because they
     didn't have horses.

     This proves that in Africa, way back in the time of the Crusades,
     there were people strong enough to defeat the Crusaders, and also
     to recognize that the loot they captured from those people was
     worth keeping as historic evidence. In other words, Africa existed
     in history. In fact another thing I learned from this man I was
     talking with is that their language is the original language of
     the Rosetta stone. And the Rosetta stone which was used to
     translate the hieroglyphics of Egypt had been unfathomable to
     European scholars until all of a sudden a group of Nigerians
     travelling in Cairo saw the Rosetta stone and although they
     couldn't read the hieroglyphics they could read the language on
     the other side. And they read the language, told the scholars
     about it, the scholars translated it into English, and then they
     decoded the hieroglyphics. That's how they solved the story of the
     Rosetta Stone, and were able to decipher the ancient Egyptian
     hieroglyphics.

     The people from Nigeria had this ancient culture which produced
     the language which is on the Rosetta Stone and for centuries
     nobody could translate the Rosetta stone forgetting that the
     Africans had that history and that culture and our history books
     leave them out with a big zero. We don't know anything about
     Africans in history. Well, this is true even more so, even to a
     greater degree when we think about China, and India, and
     Indonesia, and southeast Asia. They have ancient history.

     The history we study through Europe, and back to the Middle East,
     runs back what? 1000 years before Christ, 2000 years before
     Christ. Easily the history of India and southeast Asia goes back
     eleven or twelve thousand years. Easily the history of Indonesia
     goes back thousands of years and the history of China is almost
     limitless. It is quite obvious that the Chinese culture, to
     include the manufacture of such things as cast iron, or the
     ability to print on paper, goes back long before such things were
     even contemplated by anyone in even the Middle East or in India.

     For reference I would recommend everyone read and study the books
     of Dr. Joseph Needham of Cambridge University in England. There is
     a whole series of books and they are absolutely indispensable to
     an understanding of the true history of man on earth. One of the
     interesting areas of Needham's work, and some of the other studies
     of the Chinese people in those days, was that the Chinese had
     mastered the ability to sail in the oceans as the Portuguese had
     later on. And the Chinese would follow the coastline down from
     China, down around southeast Asia, down around Malaysia, and back
     up to the Burmese coast, across the Bay of Bengal to Calcutta,
     down the east coat of India, past Ceylon and around the tip of
     India and on up to Bombay and even around to Arabia and East
     Africa.

     And the story goes that as the Chinese visited port cities on
     their trips along, it was like a party. As they pulled into port
     they would stand out there and waive banners and hold gifts in
     their hands. They would sing songs and they would dance. They
     wouldn't carry firearms. And the people there met them the same
     way. They were welcome to stay for years or to stay whatever
     length of time they wanted, and they opened up trade, and sailed
     back and forth between these places.

     Until one day they arrived in a certain area of the east coast of
     Africa and they were treated with hostility. And they found out
     that was as far as the Portuguese had gotten coming around from
     Portugal around Africa and using guns every time they went ashore,
     burning villages, stealing whatever they wanted.

     And it showed that the Chinese method of exploration had been a
     party with official ambassadors with presents for the local rulers
     and all, and the Portuguese system was to use guns and shoot the
     people.

     So we see quite a difference in these cultures and this has led
     even to a better understanding of their overland exploration. The
     Chinese having this enormous land mass to their west, had the same
     interest in exploring the west as we did, wondering how far the
     west went. The Chinese actually travelled with ambassadors,
     official people from their government, in parties of 15 or 20, as
     far as Bagdad. And there such parties would meet the leaders of
     Bagdad, they would talk and understand each other. The Chinese
     seem to be very adept at languages and if they didn't know the
     language, they would sit down and study it and study everything
     these people had.

     There was a very intriguing story of a party that the rulers of
     China sent back to Bagdad with a very learned leader and some 15
     or 20 scholars with him. He would sit and listen to the
     intelligent people of Bagdad as they explained how they did this,
     how they did that. Like arithmetic -- the Chinese had not learned
     the Arabic base for arithmetic, or for mathematics that spread all
     over the world. And the Chinese were taking notes in shorthand and
     they would listen and take notes in shorthand and as fast as the
     Arabs could talk to them they would transcribe it.

     This had been going on for a while -- a while meaning years --
     when another group of Chinese came and reported that the King, or
     the emperor, wanted the first group to come back -- for some
     reason they had to go back. By this time the elderly Chinaman had
     become good friends with the leader in Bagdad and he said, "Look,
     I have to return to my country, but I know there is much that we
     haven't finished studying." He said, "I would like you to give me
     7 of your best scholars, each in their own trade, their own
     specialty, and ask them to dictate to me from their books". And he
     said, "I want to write it down and take this back to my emperor."
     And the Arab chief said, "You mean, you are going to write down
     what 7 men tell you simultaneously?" He said, "yes."

     And he did. And after he had been copying for 3 or 4 hours the
     chief stopped his people and then he asked the Chinaman, "this man
     from section 3 over here, read back what he told you." He turned
     his pages, read it back perfectly. "OK, this man, No. 5, read it
     back." The Chinaman without fault had been taking down the
     shorthand listening to 7 people simultaneously. I use the figure
     7, it might have been 8 or 10. Dr. Needham tells the story with
     great thoroughness.

     What this says is that the Chinese had perfected, and we believe
     today, they retained this even more so than they had in those
     days, the ability to write a shorthand that could translate
     simultaneous lectures, not just one. And simultaneously probably
     to the number 7, 8, or 9. Dr. Needham gives the exact figure
     because he has seen it done.

     What this means is that when you put all these together -- their
     culture, their art, their trading, their ability to make cast
     iron, and bronze, they drilled for oil at 2,000 feet using bamboo
     pipe -- they were not backward people. This without any question
     puts the Chinese at a level in history certainly equal to, but
     probably higher than, the levels of Europe and the Middle East.

     Now when we educate ourselves enough to understand that, and as we
     have said earlier when we also understand that leaders of this
     world recognize a High Cabal, I think it is ridiculous, since I
     myself cannot disbelieve the existence of a High Cabal, that the
     High Cabal very probably includes Asians and more probably is led
     by Asians. I wouldn't argue that, I don't know how to explain it,
     except if you watch rain fall, you notice it all runs in
     accordance with gravity. Well, if you study mankind, you notice
     there is a sort of gravity in the day-to-day world of mankind, and
     I don't think it is all happenstance. I think that there is
     direction from, as Churchill says, the High Cabal. But I also
     believe that the High Cabal, which can include people from of
     course any region of the world -- I don't think they recognize
     countries -- I think the world is just the world for those people,
     and I believe that it would be strongly manned with Chinese or
     even probably led by Chinese.

                   Building a Bridge: Trusting Ourselves
                   to Know How to Work and Live Together

     Ratcliffe: Fascinating. One last item (we have about 20 minutes
     here), is the story you told me on the first day I arrived which I
     found so fascinating of yourself in a class of young officers and
     this assignment you were given to build a bridge. I'd like you to
     recount that for us now.

     Prouty: It has interested me for many decades, this idea of
     politics, and this idea of leadership that is thrust upon us, and
     whether or not this idea is the same as actual human experience
     and understanding of true leadership. If people are stranded on a
     desert island, they don't hold an election. They suddenly realize
     a certain person has a little more experience, a little more gift
     than the others and they follow him.

     The armies of the world are traditionally pretty well trained,
     pretty well disciplined. Before World War II we saw in the U.S.
     Army certain things that I'm afraid we don't see today. It got
     diluted in the great mass movements of World War II and since. But
     there were people there who tried to impress this previous
     understanding upon those of us who had been called in before World
     War II -- when the Army was small. I think the military forces of
     the U.S. before World War II were about 116,000 if I remember --
     and when you figure that 10 million men were flown to Vietnam
     during the Vietnam War and at any one time we had as many 550,000
     you can see what I am talking about.

     115,000 in the Armed Forces were not many people. But they were
     very skilled. And when a new officer, regardless of age, rank or
     so on, was assigned to a division, the Army had a custom of
     division officer training. And this division officer training was
     rather unique as we look back today. Although you'll find such
     training at Harvard Business School or other places where men are
     taught how to govern, how to lead people, and so on, how to run a
     business.

     One of the events I have never forgotten because it was so
     effective, it was just absolutely effective and what we saw deeply
     impressed us, was that after this group of about 60 men had been
     together for a week or so, listening to lectures from some of the
     old time colonels and sergeants and warrant officers, one of the
     courses they taught us rather superficially, but very interesting,
     was how to put together a trestle bridge.

     In those days, a trestle bridge in the army was all prefabricated
     including the posts that hold it up, the pilings at the side of
     the river to hold it up, and the planks on the top, and how they
     all fit together. The bolts and the nuts and the whole structure
     was prefabricated but it had to be put together precisely, or it
     wouldn't work. And every brook or river isn't the same width so
     you had to be able to lengthen the bridge and sometimes the banks
     were higher than others so you had to raise the bridge. The bridge
     could do that -- the prefab's structure was such that it would
     accomplish that.

     There was about a week of courses on the trestle bridge where most
     of it was taught on paper. Every once in a while they would take
     us out to a shed and show us the pieces that it consisted of, but
     we had never worked on it, we just knew what was what. One evening
     just before sundown, they picked up the whole class, about 60 men,
     piled us into a couple of army buses and began driving us
     somewhere without saying where we were going. We had no idea what
     we were going to do. And they drove us, and drove us (their only
     objective was to wait until it was dark) and finally stopped in
     the countryside somewhere beside a rather large field.

     We all got out of the buses and a sergeant said, "Gentlemen, your
     exercise for the evening lies in that field. Its a trestle
     bridge." We were all with an armored division. He said, "there are
     two tanks in the field. You are going to build that trestle bridge
     across a river that is on the other side of this field. You are
     going to drive the tanks across that bridge and your dinner for
     the evening is over there, on the other side of the river. You are
     not to swim over and get dinner. You won't have dinner unless you
     drive the tanks across the trestle bridge." Then he said, "Now I
     have one more request. Any of you people that smoke, I want you to
     give me your matches and your cigarette lighters. You are to have
     no flashlights. Hand it all in right now." And he collected
     everything. He said, "Anybody who wants to light up a cigarette,
     come see me."

     Then he sat down quietly with another sergeant and never said
     another word. He didn't say who was in charge. He didn't say
     anything. He just walked off. So there was 60 people standing by
     the side of the road, and he had mentioned "trestle bridge," so
     some of us went out into the grass and sure enough we stumbled
     over a couple of pieces here, and a couple of pieces there. They
     were very neatly packed up, there was no problem with that. And a
     few others walked over to see what the river looked like and it
     would be my estimate that it was about 40 feet across, something
     like that, and the banks were 7 or 8 feet on either side. We could
     see a bonfire on the other side and a tent was pitched so we knew
     that our dinner was over there.

     Nothing happened very quickly except a little commotion. People
     talking to each other, "But how do we get this bridge out there?"
     Then finally 3 or 4 men who knew each other said, "Hey, well at
     least we got to get this stuff over to the river. Let's start
     carrying it over there." And another group said, "Well we'll carry
     these things over there." And gradually some action just sort of
     came.

     But then from among the group, all of a sudden one man began to
     say, "Look, when you're carrying this over, put this here because
     this is the piling for the beginning of the bridge." And then,
     "Look, you 5 fellers swim across and we'll get the other piling
     over to you by" -- the river wasn't all that deep and you could
     carry it over there -- "but you get on the other side and work
     over there while we're working on this side." And finally one man
     was just saying to each group, "Okay, put it here, do this, let's
     do this."

     Everybody was cooperating beautifully. There was no problem and in
     an unbelievably short time we had actually got that bridge across
     the river. We had men beginning to lay the planks on the top, and
     the cross beams that hold those planks, and the bolts to tighten
     them down. And gradually we started walking across it with men
     carrying the planks and the bridge held them up fine.

     Once we got the planks down more men started going across with
     other things and finally this man who had been more or less
     leading these just nondescript people -- there were chaplains
     there, there were doctors, we weren't engineers, in fact there
     wasn't an engineer in the crowd -- finally said, "Well let's take
     a look at the strength of this thing." So we all stood on one
     side, it didn't tip, we all went to one end, it didn't tip. We all
     walked around using our weight to try to decide. We knew tanks
     were very heavy.

     Finally we said okay. It took one man to drive a tank but there
     was a place for another man to handle the radio and things like
     that (which you'd ordinarily call the gunner), and we used a third
     man in the turret to direct the tank because the people inside
     can't see very much. So we got two crews of 3 men who could handle
     the tanks. The first crew drove the first one around and with
     great care we aimed the first tank across the bridge and it went.
     Nothing happened. The second crew took the second tank, drove it
     across, and all the rest of the fellows went over with it and we
     had an absolutely magnificent dinner.

     The next day in class the old colonel that was running this school
     came in and he said, `Gentlemen, I want to tell you something
     about yesterday's exercise.' He said, people have lived in
     communities ever since the dawn of time. They never had an
     election, they never had politics, they never had a religious
     hierarchy. What they had was themselves, usually the elder led the
     village because he obviously had experience. If he had been
     disabled or if he wasn't quite as bright as others, they could
     push him aside, but usually the elder led the community and he
     would get things done. But if it came time to go on the hunt and
     the village was hungry and they really needed some animals, some
     food, a certain group would break off and among that group they
     knew who was the best hunter, they knew who was the best tracker,
     they didn't stop and have an election. There was no boy scout
     captain, there was no election, they just did the job. The women
     the same way. Some women could build the houses better than others
     or some could make cloth better than others.

     And he said, that's the way communities -- that's the way armies
     -- really run. He said the group will find its leader inevitably.
     He said sometimes when an army is in a terrible battle, and the
     colonel has been killed and the major has been killed, probably a
     sergeant will get up and say, Follow me. After citing examples of
     this from history he said, Gentlemen, what we did yesterday was to
     prove to you that an absolutely nondescript, untrained group will
     follow that fact without any agreement, without any election,
     without any assignment. We didn't assign the leader, we didn't ask
     you to elect the leader, we didn't say that so and so was an
     engineer and he has the experience. We left you in the dark and
     told you come over there and have dinner with us. He said, `Don't
     ever forget that because military organizations as well as
     ordinary civil organizations follow those rules. The other rules
     are more or less applied to our society but these are the basic
     rules. You need to know that in a war.'

     I have never been through a class that had quite the impact on me
     as that one did and I guess not reluctantly but it did surprise me
     as I was the officer that led the group across the bridge. Simply
     because I said to these people who were already beginning to go,
     Let's put it here and then let's do this, and the group wanted
     some kind of instruction.

     I would gladly have yielded to somebody else, but it wasn't
     necessary. The bridge got built. I think as I look back at it that
     much of the problem we have in society is that we don't trust
     ourselves. The people we elect are most likely not the people that
     can do the job anyway. Or the people that we might even follow as
     to quote religious leaders, don't necessarily know all the things
     that are best for us.

     As Buckminster Fuller says the two most powerfully disruptive
     forces in mankind are politics and religion. Now he doesn't mean
     politics as I have described it in the village, and he doesn't
     mean religion as in the basic facts of religion. He means these
     structured systems we call politics and call religion that really
     are a form of mind control. In this century I think that as much
     effort has been applied in certain areas of our leadership to gain
     mind control over the people of the world as they have over any
     other kind of control. I think that the very history of an
     organization we call the British Society of Psychic Research (and
     its very strong American offshoot) is evidence of the fact that
     today people are not asked to think. They are told what to think,
     whether it makes sense or not. I think this is a most fundamental
     fact of our life today.

     Ratcliffe: Thank you very much Fletcher Prouty.



 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------


               This document is available electronically at:

      http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/USO/chp3_p2.html    (HTML)
      http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/USO/chp3_p2.txt     (ASCII text)