WORLD AFFAIRS COUNCIL

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80B01554R003000040001-8
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 12
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 25, 2001
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: March 29, 1979
• Content Type: SPEECH

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WORLD AFFAIRS COUNCIL
Los Angeles, CA
29 March 1979
Thank you very much, John. Your description of why I was selected
for this position is one that I believe, my mother believes, but John
McCone, sitting on my right, does not. Because he asked me during this
luncheon how I happened to shift from the Navy to intelligence and I
confessed. I said I got it strictly on merit; I was a Naval Academy
classmate of the President.
This is a very important period in American intelligence right now.
We are undergoing a series of profound changes. Changes that are both
fundamental, far-reaching, and I believe, beneficial. They are changes
not generated from within, they are changes that are the result of three
external factors. The first of these is an evolving and different
perception by the United States of its role in international affairs.
The second is the burgeoning capabilities which American industry, with
its sophistication, is giving to us in the technical intelligence fields
that John McCone described to you briefly. The third factor is the
increasing interest and concern of the American public in the intelligence
activities of our country ever since the investigations of the period
1974 to 1976. What I would like to do briefly today is to discuss these
three factors for change and how they are bringing about a different
intelligence process for our nation.
Let me start with the changing perception of our role in the world.
I believe that as a country we are in a period of transition. A transi-
tion from a very activist, interventionist mode in international affairs
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to one in which there is a greater recognition of the emits on our
ability to influence events in other countries. This is by no means to
say that we are approaching a period of retrenchment towards isolationism.
I believe, in fact, that we are gradually emerging from our post-Vietnam
aversion to any intervention on the international scene, and instead, are
entering into an era where our view of the world is much more reasonable
and much more balanced. Clearly we, the United States, must continue to
play a major role on the world scene. Yet the circumstances today are
such that we must gauge much more carefully than ever before what that
role can be and should be.
Look, for instance, at the difficulty that we have today simply
deciding whom we are for and whom we are against on the international
scene. Traditionally we were always in favor of those whom the Soviets
were oppressing or were opposed to. But such a criteria, had we applied
it just last year in 1978, would have been very difficult for us. Let me
just give you a couple of examples.
In February and March of last year there was a war between Ethiopia
and Somalia. The Soviets were for Ethiopia, against the Somalians. But
Somalia was governed by a Marxist dictator who was the aggressor in
this war. It's difficult for us to pick that side to be in favor of
simply because the Soviets were opposed to it. Last December there was
another war between Vietnam and Cambodia. The Soviets were supporting
Vietnam. Should we have supported P'ol Pot, the leader of Cambodia, a man
who had a regime that was perhaps more oppressive than any on the globe
since Adolf Hitler? A choice difficult for us today to tell the white
hats from the black, to really know where our national interests lie.
Communism is no longer made of a whole cloth.
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In addition, it is not nearly so clear today that the consequence
of another nation succumbing to communist influence is irreversible as we
often once thought. We have had examples in Indonesia, the Sudan, Egypt,
and Somalia where they were locked under considerable communist domination
and yet they have come back to independence. So today there is a legiti-
mate question in our body politic as to whether it is necessary to come
to the rescue of countries being subjected to communist pressures.
Even when we do decide that some struggling nation deserves our
support, there are problems in providing that support today which simply
did not exist a decade or two ago. One of these stems from the revolution
in international communications. Today on the international scene any
action that we take will be almost instantly communicated around the
world, subjected to analysis and instantly judged. And that international
public judgment--sometimes approbation, sometimes criticism--does influence
events and does inhibit even major countries like ourselves and the
Soviet Union, even though the countries expressing approbation or
criticism are generally second- or third-level powers.
If then, we attempt to sway other countries through diplomacy or
international organizations, there are other difficulties today also,
difficulties we did not face in the past. In the past, most free nations
of the world followed our lead on the international political scene.
Today in such fora as the United Nations, each country usually votes
its own one vote independently of what the major powers desire and, in
fact, the major powers most frequently find themselves on the short end
of those votes. If in frustration with diplomacy, we decide instead to
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try military intervention, there are still other problems today that did
not exist not too long ago. The memory of Vietnam tells us that when the
pendulum of offense and defense in military weaponry is tending towards
the defense, as I believe it is today, even minor military powers can
cause a lot of problems for major military nations.
What all this adds up to then is not that we are impotent in
world affairs, but that the leverage of our influence, while it is still
considerable, must be exercised more subtly if it is to be effective. We
must be more concerned with the long-term, underlying influences rather
than just putting our finger in the dike here and there. We must be able
to anticipate rather than just react to events. We must be able to look
beneath the surface and see what forces are really influencing and can be
changed and driven over time if we work at it gradually. For us in the
intelligence world this means that we must vastly expand the scope of our
endeavors.
Thirty years ago our primary concern was to keep track of Soviet
military developments. Today the threat to our national well-being comes
not only from actions of the Soviet Union, and not only from military
matters, we must be concerned with a subject matter which has much
broader scope. We cannot ignore the importance of military events and
military technology, but we must broaden our outlook to include politics,
economic, food, world population, energy resources, terrorism, narcotics,
the health and psychiatry of world leaders, and many other fields. In
fact there is hardly an academic discipline, there is hardly an area of
the world about which we must not be able to provide good information to
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our nation's leaders. Hence this is a demanding time or intelligence
and one of fundamental change in which the subject matter of our work is
expanding vastly.
The second major factor which I suggested was driving. change in our
intelligence family is a technological revolution which affects how we
collect our information. Basically, as John McCone outlined to you,
there are three ways of acquiring information about other countries--by
photographs from satellites and airplanes; by the intercept of signals
passing through the air such as in this room today, signals from military
equipment, signals from communications systems; and finally, from human
collection, the traditonal spy.
The first of these two--photographs and signals intercept--are what we
call technical systems of collection as opposed to the human means. Our
capabilities in the technical area, thanks to the great sophistication of
American industry, are really expanding every day. Interestingly, though,
rather than this denigrating the value or the need for the traditional
human intelligence activity, it in fact increases its importance.
Broadly speaking, what technical intelligence collection tells you is
something about what happened in the past in some other country, it often
raises more questions than it answers. People then come to you and say,
but why did that happen and what is going to happen next? Uncovering the
concerns of other countries, the pressures which influence their decisions
and their intentions, is the unique forte of the human intelligence agent
and it is indispensable if we are going to hope to be able to anticipate
these future trends and to gear our foreign policy to looking towards
influencing events more in the future than in the immediate period. This
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means for us in intelligence, however, that we have a new challenge. A
challenge of being able to pull together these efforts in the photographic,
signals, and human intelligence spheres, orchestrating them so that they
can complement each other, so that we can learn what our policy makers
need to know in the least expensive and the least risky manner. What
questions a photograph cannot answer we try to answer by looking in the
signals or the human field. For instance, the plans which may be hinted
at in a conversation may be confirmed by a photograph. Or you may have a
photograph of a new industrial facility and you do not know whether it is
a nuclear weapons plant or something in the commercial field, and that is
when you target your human intelligence activity to try specifically to
find out what that picture really means. All this may seem very simple
and very logical to you, but our technical capabilities are growing so and
are so relatively new and almost overwhelming to us that we can no longer
do business in our traditonal way.
Intelligence in our country is a large bureaucracy and it is spread
over numerous agencies and departments, each of which has its own priorities
and its own concerns. The Director of Central Intelligence has always,
since the National Security Act of 1947, been authorized to coordinate
all of these intelligence activities whatever their department or agency.
Until recently, however, he has not had adequate authority to do that
properly. President Carter, just a little over a year ago, signed a new
Executive Order strengthening the authorities of the Director of Central
Intelligence specifically over the budgets and the collection activities
of all of these various national intelligence activities. This process
of using these new authorities is still evolving, it is one that is
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coming along well, an it is going to make a very substantial difference
in the management of intelligence in this country.
The third factor I mentioned was the change, or the increase, in
public interest in intelligence ever since the investigations. Those
investigations brought to American intelligence activities more public
attention than there has ever been in the history of the world in any
major intelligence organization. There were substantial benefits both to
the public and to us in intelligence from those investigations and that
visibility. But there was also an unfortunate side effect. This was the
destruction of much of the confidence and support which the American
public had traditionally held for its intelligence organizations. Thus,
while I am today seeing a gradual return of that support and confidence,
I also recognize a lingering suspicion in some quarters that questions
whether intelligence organizations are still engaged in the kinds of
activities for which we were criticized. I can assure you that we are
not.
Moreover, we now have a series of oversight procedures which serve
as an important check on intelligence. To begin with there is the
President himself, who takes a very direct and a very personal interest
in what we are doing. Beyond that, there is the President's Intelligence
Oversight Board which has opened itself to the entire American public to
hear of possible abuses and which reports only to the President on its
findings. And then there are two intelligence committees of Congress who
conduct a thorough oversight of our activities. And last, but not least,
there is, of course, the American press which is much more interested
today and much more persevering in learning what we are doing than it
ever has been before.
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Now the impact of all this added visibility has been very substan-
tial. In fact, for the professionals in intelligence it has been traumatic.
The right kind of visibility can be beneficial to both the public and to
us in intelligence. By the right kind I mean public access to information
which permits you to understand in generic terms at least what we are
doing and why, which enables you to assure yourself we are not doing
things that we should not. We need, however, through this process of
greater visibility, to regenerate this sense of confidence that we are
not invading the rights of Americans. We did this in part last year with
a new Foreign Surveillance Act which was passed by the Congress and which
goes a long way to ensure against violations of American privacy. Beyond
that, we are trying just to be more open about the things we do. We are
passing more of what we study and analyze directly to you in unclassified
form through regular publication of our analytic work. In fact, if you
are interested as you leave today, we will have some samples of recent
unclassified publications available to you at the door. We are also out
in public as I am privileged to be with you today, speaking more. We are
answering questions more. We are participating more in academic symposia
and conferences. I know that our Intelligence Community is doing an
honorable and a vital job for this country and I, personally, want you to
know as much about it as possible.
Yet clearly, as I am sure you would recognize, much of the publicity,
much of the visibility that we have is unwanted, unhelpful, and benefits
no American. Here I am talking of the unauthorized disclosures of
properly classified information. At the least these disclosures are
demoralizing to our intelligence services. Services that have traditionally,
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and of necessity, operated largely in secrecy. But far more important is
the destructive effect which such disclosures can have on our long-term
ability to do what we are mandated to do by the President and by the
Congress.
First of all, no foreign intelligence service, no individual in a
foreign country is going to entrust lives or highly sensitive information
to us if they do not think we can keep identities and information secret
when necessary. Very simply, too much is at stake. Secondly, it is
impossible to carry out a quest for information in a closed society like
the Soviet Union if what we do and how we do it is bound to become a
matter of public information in our country. Not only do these revelations
reduce our capability to produce intelligence on which our policy makers
can base sound decisions, but cumulatively they damage the long-term ability
of this country to know what is going on in many closed societies.
Because we are such an open society we often do not appreciate how much
other nations can take advantage of. us if we do not take the precaution
of being well informed. Actions like those of the Soviet Union in
entering the world wheat market without any notice in 1972 affect you and
me in our pocketbook, and other surreptitious moves like this can affect
us in our national security.
Yet let me say that overall I believe the net impact of this increased
visibility to intelligence in our country is a plus. We must have public
support, we must prevent abuses in the future. There are, of course,
minuses as well. There are the inhibitions on the actions that we can
take and the risks that we will take. The issue before us today is
really how much assurance does the nation want and need against invasions
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of privacy and against the taking of foreign policy anions which are
considered unethical. How do we make the balance between these desires
for privacy and propriety on the one hand, and good production of intelli-
gence on the other.
Congress is expected to give expression to this question of balance
very soon. It will do so in legislation establishing what are known as
Charters for the Intelligence Community. Such legislation will set out
on the one hand the authority for what we do and, on the other hand, the
parameter of the boundaries within which we must operate. It is my hope
that such legislation defining charters for us will be passed by this
Congress, written with care and sensitivity to the problems I have been
discussing. This may help to resolve some of these difficult issues.
Overreaction, either by tying our hands on the one hand or leaving us
strictly without any boundaries or instructions could be bad. The one
could emasculate our capabilities to gather necessary information,
the other could invite future problems.
After all these comments, though, let me assure you that in my view
the intelligence arm of our government is today strong and capable. It
is undergoing substantial change, yes, and that is never an easy or a
placid process in a large bureaucracy. But out of this present metamor-
phosis is emerging an intelligence community in which the legal rights of
our citizens and the constraints and controls on intelligence are going
to be balanced with a continuing need to be able to garner information
necessary for the conduct of our country's foreign policy. This is not
an easy transition. We are not there yet. But we are moving rapidly and
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surely in the right direction. When we reach our goa we will have
constructed a new model of intelligence, a uniquely American model
reflecting the laws and the ideals of our country. As we proceed down
this important path, we need your support and understanding. I am there-
fore very grateful that you have taken the time to be here today and have
asked me to be with you. Thank you.
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