| The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World | |
| Author: | L. Fletcher Prouty |
| Publisher: | Prentice-Hall |
| Media Type: | book |
| Pages: | 496 |
| Isbn: | 978-0137981731 |
| Oclc: | 869053900 |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | History |
| Pub Date: | 1973 |
| External Url: | https://archive.org/details/secretteamciaits00prou |
| External Host: | Internet Archive |
The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World is a book by L. Fletcher Prouty, a former colonel in the US Air Force, first published by Prentice-Hall in 1973.
After initial publication in 1973, Prentice-Hall republished The Secret Team in 1992 and 1997. The book was published again in 2008 and 2011 by Skyhorse Publishing, the latter edition including an introduction by Jesse Ventura.[1]
The book was offered for sale by the Church of Scientology through their Freedom magazine, during the time when Prouty was a senior editor of the magazine.[2]
In Studies in Intelligence, an official journal and flagship publication of the Central Intelligence Agency, Walter Pforzheimer described reading the book as "like trying to push a penny with one's nose through molten fudge."[3] Despite what he grants as Prouty's "considerable background and knowledge," he says the book is punctuated by "faulty recollections" and "unwarranted conclusions."[3] In a later issue, a staff writer provides a retrospective of books reviewed in Studies in Intelligence and wonders aloud "whether word ever got back to [Prouty]."[3]
Washington Monthly magazine noted that "marvelous anecdotes about the CIA's dirty-trick department are accompanied by a troubling overstatement best suggested by the subtitle, "The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World."[4]
Assassination researcher and former Office of Strategic Services officer Harold Weisberg was less than enthusiastic about Prouty’s book. He was particularly turned off by the claim that Daniel Ellsberg was a CIA agent: "He hemmed and hawed a bit on this when confronted with an unequivocal denial made by E. to Fred Graham and to Prouty by phone. Thus he looses the legitimate point."[5]