Y GROUP ATTENDANCE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80B01554R002900230001-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 19
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 25, 2001
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: February 14, 1979
• Content Type: LIST

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1_i_1I3 ;L R`i and 14 I\'4ELTINGS
(j'C-YW .44
V
William C. Bartholomay - Frank B. Fall C,. Co. , Inc.
Daniel T. Carroll - Could Inc.
D~ nald Maggin - consultant
!i Sommer - Wilmer, Cutler & Picke ing
Dr. E'dwerd David, Jr. - Exxon Research & Engineering Co.
Pichard Forwick - Newmeyer & As~,x'iates
t~~n rrly ie - -Ex,;cn .L L.
8. Se Pickard - Monsanto Chemical (bra;; kfast only)
9. William H . duPont
10. Richard Cummings (alternate for C. T. Fischer) - National Bank of Detroit
11. James Vv ?liam Fletcher - Attorney
12. Dr. Eugc>.-ic Fubini - E. G. in. Consulted+ ltd (breakfast onl-7)
13. Roderick M . Hills - Latham, Watkins, and Pills
14. Allan Cors (alternate J. R. I-Iought )n) - Dora! ; g Glass Works
15. Edwin Heard (alternate T. Killefer - United States T:-ust Co. of New York
16. Rene C'. McPherson - Dana Corporation
17. Robert F. Magill - General Motors Corporation
18. Roger H. Morley -- American Express Company
19. Angus E. Peyton - Brown & Peyton - Attorney
20. Louis F. PJik, Jr. - Leisure Dynamics
21. Thomas A. Reynolds, Jr. - Winston & Strawn
22. Dean Overman - Winston & Strawn
23. Robert G. Stone, Jr. - West India Shipping Company, Inc.
24. A. Dean Swift - Sears, Roebuck and Co.
25. Alexander B. Trowbridge - Allied Chemical Corporation
26. Jack Estes - Allied Chemical Corporation
27. Dr. L. J. Colby - Allied Chemical Corporation
28. At.hu-r De-cio- k Gefp&ra~io~~ ..
29 . Carl B. Drake-, -Jr-- The--St. Pa -1--Gompane, ine -.--keocktails, dinner oirly)
30
Stanley W. Gustafson - Dana Corporation
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3 T.-.h n T14 I
- G {f
Inr
rd-Hill & Co an
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2. Hugh C. Lane. Tr. - The Citizens & Scuthern National Bank
33. Peter Lawson-Johnston
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1 Mar 79
Address to the Y Group
0730, Wednesday, 14 Feb 1979
Watergate Hotel, Washington,DC
You're probably about as up to speed on Iran as I am, because part of
the problem last night was this attack on our embassy. And in accordance
with that as you would appreciate, one of the things which we lose is
communications and so we're really working on the press this morning. It
does appear that just before I came here that things are quiet now. Very
unfortunately it was apparently confirmed that one American marine has been
killed in the activities around the embassy. Also, a second person has
been killed. We are not sure if it was another marine or an Iranian
employee. But it appears that pro Khomeini have retaken charge of the
embassy against whatever this insurgent group was that seized our embassy.
I think about 70 embassy personnel are holed up on the 3rd floor and have
managed to survive fortunately, at least at this point. I think the
significance of this over and above it being a very unpleasant-affair,
is that as I see Iran today, we are at a stage of will a Khomeini government
be able to take charge. They have got this authority, they have the
power. Bhaktiar had the authority and power and he could not do anything
with it, he could not make the mechanism of government work. Clearly, I
think yesterday or this mornings incidents in the embassy reflect the
struggle that will go on between the leftists element, some of the tudah
parties, some of the marxist terrorist groups called the Chenks, and the
people Khoemini has designated to lead this government. I don't know how
to predict for you whether who will prevail in this but it is a very
worrisome situation. I think many of us are reasonably optimistic that if
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the Khoemini forces prevail reason will have out. I mean the Khoemini's
dictums of--let's have a banking system but no interest rate, let's have a
government but bottle it up--probably won't have tremendous impact. We
would expect that the key element would be Bazargan with his western
educated--basically a slant to the West--and whom we think will try to set
up a democracy with a an Atlantic tint. One doesn't know what that truly
means. We would suspect that Khoemini would go back home and sit and
provide religious guidance, and that trying to translate that guidance into
practical, everyday running of the government would be somebody like
Bazargan's responsibility, done with a little more realism than you could
do with a 78 year old Ayatollah.
Clearly it is not a pleasant situation and there is just going to be
tremendous uncertainty for what I would think would be weeks to come before
we see how this struggle between the left and the Khomeini forces is worked
out. As you know there was also an incident in Afghanistan last night, I
have very little information on that. Apparently four terrorists captured
our ambassador and held him hostage to get weapons. An anti-regime group.
I have no idea how they thought they were going to do something with this
when they got the weapons. The only report I have is that the Afghan
police stormed the place of Beige and in the process the ambassador was
killed by the people holding him hostage. It sounded to me like an immature
nation not knowing how to handle something like this and taking a brute
force approach.
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There is a troubled area of the world ranging all the way across
Dr. Brzezinski's arch of instability to Yemen, the Arabian Peninsula,
Iran, Afghanistan. Turkey is a problem of local instability at the moment,
not the same stage of development as these others, but one that we have to
be very concerned with and of course even in Pakistan there is a foundation
of instability there. President Zia has got to make up his mind whether
Bhutto is going to live or die and on that no win question, from his
point-of-view, a lot is going to hinge there. If he lets him off and turns
him out in the street, the odds against Zia suriving in the long run are
slim. If he commutes his sentence and leaves him in jail, he may have the
worst of both worlds. He has Bhutto to put up with, and he has the military
and others who want Bhutto dead, on his back. If he kills Bhutto, who is
undoubtedly the most popular politician in the country, he may have rioting
and serious disorder.
I wouldn't want to say that there weren't any bright spots on the
scene. If you look at the fringes of the arch we just described, clearly
in the last six months or so the Iraqi's have become very concerned and
cautious about their long term relationship with the Soviet Union. The
Saudi Arabians are in a very tenuous and difficult position. It is hard to
tell where they are going to go, but clearly all these events have alerted
them to the problem around them. The special relationship that traditionally
existed between them and the United States is up for question at the
moment. It is something that Harold Brown is out there right now talking
to the people in the area about. India has in the last two years, we
think, moved a fair distance from its traditional warm relationship with
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the Soviet Union. India is very wary of the Afghan situation as of course
is Pakistan which is right next door and was the Shah. In short, I don't
see a lot of bright signs, but I am saying that the Soviets are finding
themselves in a position today where some of these inroads they are making
are alarming people on the fringes and where the Soviets find themselves
more and more in a position of having to take sides in some of these local
disputes where they have tried to play both horses before. So, we have got
this complicated matrix in South Asia. The Soviets traditionally supporting
India, India now opening sides to the United States and China, China
having been the protector of Pakistan and around we go in a very confused
circle here.
It is causing me in my present job some interesting challenges that
I want to talk to you about very briefly and mainly respond to your questions
this morning, because these are short term issues that we are grappling
with day-by-day, but what I wanted to mention very quickly was that we are
in a period of considerable transition and change in the American intelligence
community and in the Central Intelligence Agency in particular in our
country. Change has come about for a number of reasons, change is taking
enough shape so it can tell where it is going, but we are not there yet.
One of the changes is reflected in the fact that you can sit down
with a group like this and talk without any hesitation about these far
away countries and their economic and political problems. I imagine many
others here have had operations in Iran or elsewhere and are more conversant
with the problems there than are we in the government.
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Intelligence over the last 30 years in this country has spread out
from being a largely military oriented operation to one very much involved
in economics, politics, terrorism, narcotics and has separated from the
primary focus on the Soviet Union to a focus on all kinds of countries many
of which we never heard or thought about and whose names didn't even exist
5 or 10 years ago. A number of times I deal with Zimbabwe every week--its
a name I still can't pronounce because its so new. It has caused us a real
challenge because we have had to now spread our skills from, again, a lot
of technical military orientation to just almost every academic discipline
in the book. We have had to spread our ability to collect data and find
ways which, clearly, we didn't find adequately in Iran to sample the
culture, the religion, the trends, the thinking in the society and so on in
these countries. It is an exciting, difficult challenge. Our resources
are not all that much greater and I need not belabor the fact that the
Soviet military is still a very considerable problem and we can't really
afford to diminish our attention to it in any particular area. So, we are
working to do more with less and to be sure that we find the right balance
of effort.
I happen to be very persuaded personally, in addition, that we
ought to be doing more for you, the business community of our country.
I feel bad not only that we did not give good warning to the government
on Iran, we didn't give it to business. We didn't help people like Dan,
and others of you who had operations out there. Even if we were prescient
and knew all those things, there is another problem of how do we get to you
what we know and what would be helpful to you. How do we know what you
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want to know about what is going on in other parts of the world. I am not
advocating a Japanese arrangement where the government and business are
sort of in bed together, but I think that there is something to be said
that an interchange here could be very helpful. We benefit tremendously by
inputs from you and many of our companies on a very above board, non-clandestine
way. It is a shame for us to go out and spy to get information that your
managers in various countries have because of their contacts and if there
is a shortcoming in what we did in Iran I think it would be that with
40,000 Americans there, we didn't tap this pool to get the sense of what
was going on in that country, as well as we would like to have. I don't
know any journalists, or academics or anybody else who tapped it and
predicted it, or corporations that thought it was going to lead to tension.
Maybe many corporations were taking proper defensive measures here, but
somehow as a nation we didn't bring it all together and yet we have a
tremendous intelligence pool, if you want to call it that of knowledgeable
Americans on the scene.
I don't understand frankly how much the business community that was
operating out there did understand in forecasting the problem or how
much a business community in a country like that separates itself from the
cocktail circuit in which our diplomats and military people tend to stay
and really understand what is going on at the grassroots. But somehow in
the country, one of these days, have got to bring that together better. I
look forward to working with the American business community more. One of
the ways I have tried to do that in a small bit in the last two years is
reflective of another major trend or change in the intelligence community
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of our country and that is being more open. We are more open today than
ever before. I am here with you, for instance, which probably would not
have been the case five or ten years ago, in part because of a personal
conviction that we must have the support of the American people. We had
that support for most of our 30-some years of existence simply on faith, on
the understanding that you needed to do some secret things, you needed to
get some information in the kind of world we live in. After all the
scandals and disclosures, some true some alleged, I think that faith has
eroded. The American public deserves and needs a basis for understanding
and supporting our intelligence activities, so we have tried to be more
open in explaining what we do and why we do it, and in particular with
respect to American business we have tried to publish more of our product.
I happen to be particularly proud of the fact that we warned all of you in
March of 1977 that there was going to be an energy crunch coming for the
world. Not as it was sometimes misinterpreted, that the world would run out
of energy or oil energy. But what we said back then was that in 1981,
1982, 1983, the world wasn't going to be able to get as much oil out of the
ground as it was going to want to consume on the surface and I predict to
you in the next few weeks that message will be re-emphasized in this
country, accented by the loss of a few million barrels a day of Iranian oil
which has really focused attention on it but hasn't done much except
accelerate our prediction a couple of years. It makes the problem worse,
it is not generically different than we said it was almost two years ago.
Part of that prediction was based on our feeling that the Soviet Union
would be having oil problems, would peak-out in its production about 1980.
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That was looked on with considerable skepticism by the American public, oil
companies and others. When we dug into it we found that there aren't many
oil companies or others in the United States who really study the Soviet
oil situation, didn't have much business back and forth. People have made
assumptions on what their status was and didn't have a lot of facts to back
it up. We were able to go back to some of my comments on cooperation
between industry and intelligence; we were able to take information that
corporations in this country were willing to share with us as to what they
were selling to the Soviet Union. When you pieced all the things together
you came up with a little picture and you said, hey, that makes you want to
look into the very classified, highly secret information and tie that
together and out of this we came to this understanding that the Soviet
oil production is on a down flow. Every fact since then has confirmed that
and most of the oil people then came along and agreed with us since then.
You've got Soviet oil production going down, now you have got problems
of a very special type in Iran, no way to predict whether they will try
to get back to production in a hurry. We don't think they will be able
to get back to their 5 1/2 to 6 million barrels a day, even if they
make a tremendous effort. There has been damage to the fields, the
expatriat workers have left, we suspect they won't want to go back to
that, maybe 3 million or 4 million, something like this with a net deficit
to the world. On top of that we think there are technical problems in many
of the other fields around the world and there is also a much more conserva-
tionist trend in other oil producing countries around the world. Why
should they be pumping that out of the ground when it is going to be more
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valuable to them in the ground in order for the American public to drive
his car at 70 miles per hour instead of 55 and all the other things we do
that are (in the world's view) at least a profligate use of this international
resource. The trends are all against us in terms of continuing the way we
are in the use of energy. The answer is twofold: there is going to be an
increase in prices, and constriction in availability which will mean
economic restraints. You know more than I what that will mean to you and
to the rest of the world's economy, but it is not, in my view, a promising
outlook.
Here I am, a simple sailor trying to turn from just looking at
military matters, military intelligence to becoming an economist, an
international politician of sorts. That is the kind of challenge we are
facing. It is a very exciting one. We are doing it in a completely new
atmosphere today than 5 or 10 years ago. Not only are we more open with
the public, we are under a degree of oversight and control today that is
unprecedented in the annals of international intelligence activity.
This has all come out of a period of intense criticism and investigation
of the intelligence community. The Church Committee, the Rockefeller
Report, the White Committee and so on. Out of it today, not only am I
accountable to the President as the Director of Central Intelligence has
always been, but we have a very specific Presidential written directive on
how that relationship will exist and what the reporting will be. We have
an Intelligence Oversight Board, appointed by the President to check on the
propriety, the legality of what I am doing, and all the rest of the intelligence
community. And, instead if reporting to one or two senior southern
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senators, we report to two very active committees of the Congress who
are probing us, checking on us all the time. Let alone, much more visibility
in the appropriations process of the Congress today. This is good and it
is bad.
It's good in that, you know best than anyone, accountability is what
makes you hold your feet to the fire and be judicious in your decision
making. You have an accountability to come to the bottom line. You don't
have that in the government and when the intelligence community really
didn't have what accountability can exist in the government there was more
opportunity for abuse, for mistakes, for not judging the risks as carefully
as you should. We have that accountability today, and I assure you we are
being judicious. There is a danger that you will lean overboard in that
direction and you won't take risks that you need to take. There is clearly
the danger of too many leaks and not being willing and able to do things.
We were talking about this at breakfast--on the alacrity with which informa-
tion gets out is very, very inhibiting to our government in so many respects.
Take for instance the situation in Iran. We were discussing the helicopters,
the marines and so on. I can assure you that it is actually inhibiting to
the interest of this country when you can't afford in a closed council
like I am going to at nine o'clock, down the street, to sit there and in
all candor discuss what are all the actions we will take to protect the
Americans in Iran, for fear that it will leak out tomorrow and the Turks or
somebody will be on your back and will not let you do what you need to do.
It isn't just that it is going to be embarrassing. On the one hand you
want to be sure you are ready to help the Americans, on the other hand,
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being ready and talking about it and leaking it may prevent your doing
that. It is a very frustrating thing and it has been frustrating particularly
in the intelligence world that has come from this culture of total secrecy
and is now cast into a need to be more open with the public. A very
suspicious, inquiring media in this country that still has a Watergate
psychology that says anybody working for the government must be doing
something wrong -- and this leak phenomenon. I can assure you that the
combination of the unwanted attention of publicity and the necessary
attention of publicity has shaken the intelligence structure of our country
because the people who have been raised in it all these years have not
understood the need for some of that and the frustration of having to put
up with the rest of it. It has taken us through a trough of morale problems,
a trough of adjustment to these kinds of changes I have been trying to
describe to you.
I think we are snapping out of it and snapping out of it frankly, in
part because we are also in the midst of a generational change. If you
look on a working generation of perhaps 30 years, we have been in business
in the Central Intelligence Agency 32 years, we are beginning to see the
old guard pass and a new guard come. That transition, that change from a
totally secretive, quiet clandestine operation to one that has got to be
done under some public scrutiny, under considerable Congressional and
Executive oversight is a really rather different thing. Adjusting at the
same time, what I would call our product line, away from just military to
all these other areas is an added challenge, an added sense of adjustment.
I believe we are in a very healthy state nonetheless, I believe that
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the model of intelligence we are evolving here is a going to find the right
balance it hasn't yet, between the oversight and public attention and the
necessary secrecy which must go on. And I find a much greater receptivity
in the American public, even in the media occasionally, to an understanding
that we must have some secret activities in our government and that we
can't go on without being informed in this kind of a world we live in. If
there is a silver lining in the cloud of all the criticism of intelligence
in Iran, it's that people care. At least there is an understanding that we
have to know these things. I find that heartening in many regards.
I want to stop and take your questions, but just leave you with the
thought that we have been and still are going through some difficult
periods of adjustment and transition, but I have tremendous confidence in
the quality of the people we have , particularly the new young ones coming
up into the system and I believe we have a very healthy and capable intelligence
capability in our country today. It's one that does serve us well and is
being geared to serve us even better in the year ahead. Sorry, to have
gone on as long as I have.
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Y Group Question & Answers
Q. One of the foundations of a sound intelligence network is the ability
to work closely with other countries and rely on what they find out
and talk back and forth in areas that complement each other. Have
we maintained that ability given the varied problems you cited of open
exposure and open intelligence work that has been so characteristic of
the last few years and which has been seriously questioned by a number
of our allies who wonder as to whether we are trustworthy in our
intelligence work.
A. There's no question that is a problem. I don't think the greater openness
in itself scares them off, but the unwanted openness does. When
the Agee's print books which disclose our operations--and we don't and
can't do anything about it--that really hurts, because people in
many other countries don't understand that a former employee can go
out and violate his secrecy agreement and publish things inimical
to the best interests of our country and just get away with it
scott free. It makes them wonder if we are serious. Now, at the
same time I would have to say, an interesting facet of intelligence
today that is different, I think more than ever before just after
World War II, is that there are really only two countries in the
world capable of having a full intelligence capability. It is so
expensive to have a satellite as a listening post and all these
other things, that not even our closest allies like the French and
the British can afford to have the full panoply. That gives us a
lot of leverage in the kind of thing you are talking about. In short,
there is a limit to how much they can, if they want, cut us off
because we have a lot of things to offer to them. I, haven't had
to exercise that leverage too much to begin with, but we don't think
that at this stage they are holding out on us in other liaison activities
to any substantial extent. I will say that if we can't curb things
in the way of Agee type releases in the next year or two, it could
get worse.
Q. There was a story in the New York Times the other day that the Israeli's
in 1977 saw the beginning of the Shah's decline and began to
position themselves to get oil from other sources. Query: did the
Israeli's share that with us and if they did, did we listen?
A. No, they didn't share it with us. They may have done this on their
own. We have very close liaison with them--I don't really think they
did predict it myself. An Israeli general came here and was telling
people they had and I called him up on it and said if you've been telling
us this, he was claiming he was telling us this, I said I want to know
who you told it to and I got a letter of apology back.
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Q. Could you tell us a little bit about Khomeini and his background
and his connections with the Russians?
A. We may be taken in, but we don't feel that he has a Russian or
communist leaning. There is nothing in his background that would
point that way. His whole tenet in life is religion, he knows
the Russians are an atheistic state; he sees the
antipathy between his land and communism and he, as most
Iranians, I think, is very well aware of the problems of the
big bear on the northern border and one that has two problems
with Iran: One, a large muslim population that can be infected
by the activities of the south and therefore wants to control
those activities, and particularly wants to control an islamic
resurgent leader like Khomeini. Secondly, what I described
before with the Russian oil problem they clearly have their eyes on
that part of the world. That does not mean of course, that part of
Khomeini's entourage may not have been affected in these years of
attempting to undercut the Shah by support from the Tudah people
or support directly from the Soviets. We do not have close identi-
fication; we suspicion that some of those who may have more leftist
leanings than...... (Tape end)
Beginning Side B
Q. Has any attention been paid...... inaudible.
A. We try to follow that kind of activity in any country and one
as close to us as Canada, we watch with particular care.
Now, this comes to a very fundamental and.touchy problem.
The relationship is such that you go and ask Mr. Trudeau what
is going on and he is pretty forthright with you.
The extreme is, there is very little old, other than the risk
of getting caught, of spying on the Soviet Union and nobody
is going to be too upset if we get in trouble there. Now
in between the Canadas and the Soviets, there are the Irans and the
Pakistans all these other people that you want to know something
about what is going on, and the degree of risk you will take
in order to get that information varies with what you judge
to be the importance of it versus the damage to our country
if you get caught. So, we follow Canada in a very benign way
and we follow the Soviet Union in a very intrusive way. Each
country in between we find a different kind of mix according to
the risks. The risks in Iran were high. Savak is a very pervasive
organization. The risks were high in that a man like the Shah never
would understand why you were trucking with the opposition, he would
assume you were trying to undercut him not maybe to help him by letting
him know what the opposition were doing whereas his own service would not.
So, yes we are very interested in what is going on in Quebec and
we think the domestic political scene up there such that there
is a reasonable probability that a referendum for a more autonomous
situation will pass. It's probably not going to be held this year, so
I am not going to make a prediction at this stage. It certainly
has some political momentum and appeal and that movement could cause
real problems again for us.
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Q. Two questions about Iran. First, some of us have been told that the
radical movement in the oil fields is not necessarily subject to
Khomeini's leadership and it could be dangerous if it remains out of
control. Second, how concerned should we be about the degree of
electronic capacity of a sensitive nature to us, if left in Iran
beyond our control to destroy or get out.
A. Back in December Khomeini sent the now prime minister Bazargan down to
try to get the oil fields back into at least enough production to keep
the country running. Bazargan was surprised, we think, when he got
there and found out his negotitors couldn't get results because the
strikers were not willing to do things just because Khomeini said to
do them. That is part of the struggle which I think we are going to
see devolve in the weeks just ahead. There is no evidence that I have
of Russian inspiration of that. I am always in a difficult spot
answering this one because I don't want to appear naive. One assumes
they are trying to do this and one assumes that one of the reasons
these strikers have been resistant to Khomeini is simply that they
have been indoctrinated by the Tudah. We do know that over the past
decade the Tudah party has done more proselytesizing more recruiting
in the oil field worker area than elsewhere. Yes, there is some
communist/Russian influence here, no doubt about it. I don't have a
lot of hard evidence, however, particularly of current activity,
financing or so on. That is very difficult to pin down. Most of the
electronic equipment, F-14 aircraft, missiles, missiles on Iranian
navy ships was all sold. presumably with the thought that there was a
reasonable balance between risks of ..(inaudible)., and the value of
having them there. None of us would be happy if these airplanes or
missiles fell directly in the hands of the Soviet Union, clearly. I
suspect, however, that much of the technology that is known, if not
through Aviation Week, is through previous spying that has gone on.
In short, it would not be a particularly happy scene to have it fall
directly in these people's hands to pick up an F-14 and fly it and so
on. But, I don't think it is going to be a major breakthrough for the
Soviets. There are others more qualified than I on weapons, and they
would know better how long it would take the Soviets to replicate
anything that we had in there and I don't think it would help them,
but it would make that instaneous carbon copy transfer sort of thing.
The other, of course is the countermeasure they may be able to take if
they understand the kind of electronic system better; that clearly is
a problem.
Q. Admiral are you satisfied with the ability of the intelligence
agencies today to recruit able young men and women so that you
have a good pool handy?
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A. Yes. We are lucky. I think the young people of this country are just
super and they have seen through a lot of this and even in the types
of criticism, 3 or 4 years ago, recruiting didn't drop off. Our
numbers are up this year from last and last spring we put an ad in the
New York Times and holy mackerel we had two and a half times more
applicants that month. If I say that in some public forum, the telephone
goes off the hook. I was in Boston a few months ago, on a morning tv
talk show and somehow this question came up and I said we were looking
for more women to join our clandestine service. Later in the afternoon,
Charlie Battaglia over here called up our recruiting office up there
and they said the phone has been buzzing ever since the Admiral got
off the tube this morning. The quality is the same, we think
it is pretty close. I would be interested in your reflections on
this, to those of you in the overseas business. We are having more
trouble getting people who want to join the overseas element of the
agency. The military can often send a wife and a husband team to the
same place together, but they've a big operation. My activities
overseas are measured in much smaller numbers in the Central Intelligence
Agency than maybe the Army or something, so it is hard to find a
place where in the same locale you can locate a wife and a husband
who have different skills, different grade levels and get a meaningful
job for these each. We are having problems in taking the recruits and
finding enough of them who will say yes, I would like to sign up for
life of largely overseas living. It is a different culture today and
I don't know how we're going to attack that one. We are trying to
change the emoluments, we are trying to change the privileges and so
on. There are limits to what I can get the government to let me
pay the people who go overseas and how much that will really attract
people. The wife is not very happy sitting in some country twiddling
her thumbs.
Q. Would you comment briefly on the situation in Southeast
Asia as it pertains to the Soviet Union and China?
A. That is a very touchy one. I think the irony of it is that
the best guerilla warfare people have got themselves mired down in
a guerrilla warfare problem. We think the Vietnamese
kicked that thing off either on the assumption that the
Cambodians would hate Pol Pot more than they would hate
the Vietnamese, and therefore it would rally to the Vietnamese
to accept them and that didn't prove to be true. Or,
because in November they had a battle in Northeast
Cambodia and wiped out a Cambodian division and maybe thought
that Cambodia was going to fight main force battle fights.and that
they could go in there and clean it up quickly. Well they went in
and the Cambodians disappeared into the bush just like the
Vietnamese had done to us and others. So, there is a very substantial
resistance movement going on. Clearly, the Russians are supporting
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the Vietnamese in this. I think in large measure they already have
their position in Vietnam, but because they are smarting from the
Japanese/US overtures to China which has North Korea more in China's
camp than Russia's, so north and east Asia is anti-Soviet from a
Soviet point-of-view and they are saying we are going to show those
people by consolidating our position and expanding it and showing our
strength in Southeast Asia. You heard Deng Xiaoping; he said we
are going to teach them a lesson. He's very concerned of the impact
of the other lesson, i.e., we, the Soviets, can back our forces down
here on Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Whether Deng
Xiaoping will be as bold in fact, now that he has been home almost a
week, and launch that attack, I don't know. But there are sizeable
Chinese forces available in that area to do it, larger forces than
just a threat. It remains a danger, a real possibility. Success for
the Cambodians may in fact make it less necessary for China to do
that. Of course, then the 64 dollar question is if China feels it
has to teach a lesson and how. How bad will it be. Will they try to
go all the way to Hanoi and try to topple the government
there or do something like that, or just and demonstrate they are
tough guys and, depending on how tough they are, what will be the
Soviet reaction be. More aid for Vietnam, would there be the establish-
ment of Soviet bases in Vietnam, would there be a corresponding raid
or incursion on the Chinese border to the north. It is a very touchy
and dangerous situation now. There is a lot of pride hanging on the
line, a lot of thinking towards the long term and what this portends
for the attitudes of the other countries in the area. We hope it
can be contained and not get out of control, but we don't know how to
predict it.
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