ADDRESS BY LIEUTENANT GENERAL VERNON A. WALTERS BEFORE FORT LAUDERDALE COUNCIL NAVY LEAGUE OF THE UNITED STATES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80R01731R002000110003-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 23
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 21, 2003
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: June 16, 1976
• Content Type: SPEECH

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ADDRESS
by
LIEUTENANT GENERAL VERNON A. WALTERS
before
FORT LAUDERDALE COUNCIL
NAVY LEAGUE OF THE UNITED STATES
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
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Thank you very much. I am very happy to have this
occasion to talk to this Navy League Council, in the pres-
ence of so many distinguished guests, including representa-
tives of the Royal Navy, who are here tonight.
I thought I would talk to you, but before I talk to
you I must say that I speak with a certain sadness as I
learned shortly before I came here that our Ambassador to
Beirut, Lebanon, Francis Meloy, was kidnapped and murdered
along with his economic counselor and his Lebanese driver
this afternoon. It makes you wonder what kind of a world
we live in. From the middle ages, the person of an ambas-
sador has always been sacred. This is the second ambassador
we have lost in just a few years. I think it is eloquent
of the kind of a world in which we live and the anarchy and
the winds of folly that are blowing around the world today
that make all men who are concerned with the survival of
freedom and with some kind of a system of international
peace and justice concerned with what is going on.
I am going to talk to you tonight about what I truly
believe to be the oldest profession in the world. There
are others who believe that another profession, which has
been receiving considerable attention in the press recently,
is the oldest profession. But I would remind you that
before this other profession could operate someone had to
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know where it was. That was intelligence, which is therefore
the oldest profession in the world.
The United States has always had a very ambivalent view
of intelligence. We liked it but we don't like to admit that
we did it. We sort of think it was all right for all those
old British, French, Russians, and Germans to do it, but we
fine, moral, upstanding Americans don't do that sort of thing.
Well we have, fortunately, otherwise we would not be a free
and independent nation today. We have always built up our
intelligence during the conflicts in which we have participated
and then we destroy it. A little while ago in my biography,
you heard, that I went to the Army Military Intelligence
Training Center at Camp Ritchie in 1942. Do you know who
was running it? A British colonel. That was the state of
American intelligence in August 1942. We didn't have anybody
qualified to run it.
In the invocation Nathan Hale was mentioned. I must
make a confession. The chaplain that made the invocation has
departed so I can tell this story safely. Out at the CIA we
have a statue of Nathan Hale. It was put up over my bitter
protest. Not that he wasn't a very brave young man, he did
utter a very immortal line that he regretted that he had only
one life to give for his country. The problem with Nathan
Hale was that he was a spy who was caught on his first mis
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sion and he had all the evidence on him. I am not sure that
this is what we want to hold up to our young career trainees
as an example. He was sent by Washington into Manhattan to
find out when the British were going to land? They met him.
They were already there. But we have always had this view and
we have engaged in a sort of striptease of our intelligence
that has stupefied our foreign friends. They have had prob-
lems with their intelligence services and when they do, they
set up a discreet commission of inquiry which inquires,
reports to the parliamentary body or to the responsible par-
ties, and they sanction people who have done wrong, and they
take corrective measures to prevent certain abuses.
I must tell you that not long ago a Congressman asked
me how you could abolish abuses in intelligence, and I said
that I had only one suggestion. That was to stop using human
beings, because as long as you use human beings certain things
are going to happen that you would prefer not to happen.
Why do we need this intelligence? We need this intel-
ligence because we live in a very unsafe world. Less than
20 percent of mankind lives today in what we would call
freedom. The others live in various forms of repression and
tyranny. We in America face the situation we have not faced
since our Revolution. For the first time we face a poten-
tial adversary who is a global power. Germany at the height
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of its power was basically a continental European power,
with no capability to harm the United States other_ than
by submarines sinking some ships off our coasts. The Soviet
Union is a global power. The Soviet Union is able and wil-
ling, as Angola shows, to project its powers 10,000 miles
from the Soviet Union. We see the Soviet Union deploying
five, perhaps six, new types of long-range, :intercontinental
ballistic missiles, all of them heavier and more accurate
than the generation they replaced. We see the Soviet Union
building very large numbers of submarines, equipping them
with missiles which they can fire at the United States, not
from mid-Atlantic, but right from their home port waters.
We see a Soviet Navy that in a few years has gone from a
coast guard-type Navy to a blue-water navy. We see the
Soviets developing aircraft with capabilities against the
United States, as well as against our European and Asiatic
allies. We see the Soviet Union upgrading all of its con-
ventional forces and spending considerably more money on
defense than we do out of a gross national product less than
half as big as ours. We see burgeonings of the same thing
in China.
I feel that we in the Intelligence Community owe the
American people the answers to four overriding questions:
Who will be in control of the Soviet Union five years from
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today? What will be their attitude toward us and toward our
allies? What is there in Soviet research and development
today that will impact on our lives tomorrow? And the same
questions for China, a little further down the line. So
this is the kind of a world in which we live. And the real
issue before the American people is: do they want to have
effective intelligence or do they want to wait until the day
when we have to choose between abject humiliation and nuclear
blackmail.
It is to many of our foreign friends a stupefying thing
that someone in my position would be out talking to the gen-
eral public. They come into my office with a slightly glassy
stare after they have seen the road sign outside the building
which says CIA. One of them said to me, "I don't believe it,
it isn't possible, you're not pointing an arrow at your secret
intelligence service." In most other countries, no one knows
who's in them or even if they exist." It reminds me of a
story that was told to me not long ago by the head of a
foreign service. He said, "The Soviets recruited a spy in
Naples, and they took him to Moscow and trained him in secret
writing, shortwave communications, codes and everything else.
Then they sent Agnello back to Naples and said, "Now you wait
there, we'll be in touch with you in a couple of years." So,
in a couple of years somebody came out from Moscow, went to
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the address, looked at the names on the door, and he saw Agnello,
ground floor right. He went in and pushed the button. The man
opened the door and said, "Agnello, I have come from Moscow."
The man looked at him and he said, "Signore, there is a big
mistake. I am Agnello the tailor, Agnello the spy is on the
third floor left." And the head of this foreign service said,
"Sometimes I suspect that Agnello was really an American."
Be that as it may, we have come through this lengthy
investigation. You have heard all about the allegations that
were made. Let me talk to you about these allegations for a
minute. I cannot tell you that there were not things done
that should not have been done. I cannot tell you that there
were not abuses. I cannot tell you that there were not kooks.
I cannot tell you that there was not bad judgment. But I
would like to put this a little bit into perspective. Every-
body has talked about assassination. What was the ultimate
finding of all of these investigations? Nobody was assassinated.
Yes, a. lot of people talked about it. Well, a lot of people
talked about a lot of things. But nobody was assassinated.
You all saw the picture of the dart gun which a Senator held
up very cheerily. The dart gun was never used. That, of
course, was played in the low key.
Then we get to those various allegations of what was
going on. First, you heard about the massive wire taps which
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gave you the impression that for the last thirty years every-
body in the United States has had his phone conversations
listened to by the CIA. What are the facts? The facts are
that the Director of Central Intelligence is the only person
in the United States who is charged by law with the protection
of his sources and methods. These wire taps were against
people from CIA who were suspected of taking things home or
of communicating with foreign agents. How many were there?
There were 32 wire taps in 27 years. That is one and a quarter
wire taps a year. But the impression conveyed to the American
people was that "big brother" was listening to everything
they were saying.
Then we got the break-ins. All of the break-ins were
against CIA employees who were suspected of taking documents
home with them.
Then you heard about the drug experiments. Well, we
saw a man like Cardinal Mindszenty, who had resisted every
pressure the Nazis could bring to bear on him. Suddenly the
communists brought him before the newsreel cameras, hollow-
eyed, to confess every crime in the book. Those of us who
were old enough to remember believed it was done with mind-
bending drugs. We believed those drugs might be used against
us, and we had to find out how to defend ourselves against
it. And it was not just the armed forces and the CIA that
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were engaged in such research. The National Institutes of
Health and a great many very respectable, very liberal uni-
versities were doing exactly the same thing.
Then you had these toxins, so-called drugs. Well, the
Russians used those to kill some people in Germany in the 50's.
We were afraid they would be used on us, and, yes, we experi-
mented to find out how they worked so that we could defend
ourselves and, if need be, retaliate. You know the United
States committed itself not to use poison gas before World
War II. That did not prevent the United States from making
many millions of poison gas shells to be used in retaliation
in case they were used against us. Most of you who have
been in the service know that every command and every country
has contingency plans. A contingency plan does not mean
that you intend to do it; it means that you have a plan for
a certain set: of circumstances.
These allegations have been used to try and demonstrate
to the American people that the real threats to the freedom
of the American people come from the CIA and the FBI. The
CIA has never had the power to arrest anybody. How you are
supposed to be a gestapo when you can't arrest anybody, I
don't know. These facts are carefully, of course, not
mentioned.
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If we go back 2,500 years, we find a Chinese author, a
man by the name of Sun Tzu, who wrote a book called The Art of
War. He describes how to undo your enemies. Remember, this
book is 25 centuries old. Let me just quote to you some of
the things he said. The first general consideration was:
"Fighting is the most primitive and crude form of making war
on your enemies." And then he goes on to describe how to
take them apart without fighting. "Cover with ridicule
everything that is valid in your opponent's country. Denounce
their leaders, involve them in criminal enterprises and at
the right time turn them over to the scorn of their fellow
countrymen. Aggravate by every means at your command all
existing differences within your opponent's country. Agitate
the young against the old." There are 13 of these and he
concludes by saying, "The greatest excellence is not to win
a hundred victories in a hundred battles; the greatest
excellence is to subdue your enemies without ever having
to fight them."
I think not enough of us are prepared for what I
believe are the new forms of war, which is the combination
of the threat of the use of war with all kinds of activity
to make us wonder about the justice of our own cause. It
has been repeatedly proved that it is difficult to stop
the United States from the outside. If you want to stop
it, you have to stop it from the inside.
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You know someone told me a story the other day
that I thought was very good. It was about three sailors
who were shipwrecked on an island in the Pacific. One
was French, one was British, and one was American. They
were immediately captured by cannibals. And the chief
of the cannibals said to them, "I have some bad news and
good news for you." The bad news is that we're going to
have you for lunch tomorrow, and I don't mean as guests.
The good news, and you need some good news after that bad
news, is that I'll give you anything you want in the
meantime." So, he turned to the Frenchman and he said,
"What do you want?" The Frenchman said, "Well, if I am
going to be killed in the morning I would just as soon
spend the remaining hours with that beautiful cannibal
girl over there." So they said, "Fine." They untied
the Frenchman and he and the cannibal girl went off into
the woods. Then they turned to the Englishman and they
said, "What do you want?" The Englishman said, "I want
a pen and paper." They said, "What do you want a pen
and paper for?" He said, "I want to write a letter to
the Secretary General of the United Nations to protest
against the unjust, unfriendly, and unsporting attitude
you have adopted toward us." So they said, "'Okay," and
they took the Englishman to a hut and they untied him
and gave him a pen and paper, and he sat down and started
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his "Dear Mr. Waldheim" letter. Then they turned to the
American and they said, "What do you want?" The American
said, "I want to be led into the middle of the village,
I want to be made to kneel down, and I want the biggest
cannibal here to kick me in the rear end," and the chief
turned to his vice-chief and he said, "Those Americans
are a weird bunch; you never know what they will ask for.
But since I promised, we've got to do it." So, they
untied the American, they led him into the middle of the
village, they made him kneel down, and the biggest cannibal
took a running leap, kicked the American in the rear end,
and knocked him 15 feet. As the American sprawled out,
he pulled out a tommy gun he had been hiding under his
clothes, and he cut down the nearby cannibals, and the
rest fled. Well, hearing the gunfire, the Frenchman came
out of the woods and the Englishman came out of his hut,
and they looked at the American standing there with a
smoking tommy gun in his hand, and they said,, "My God,
do you mean to say that you had that gun the whole time."
The American said, "Sure." And they said, "Why didn't
you use it before now?" And the foreigner who told me
the story said, "The American looked at them with a hurt
expression, and he said, 'But you don't understand, it
wasn't until they kicked me in the rear end that I had
any moral justification for such extreme action'."
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Now, we have been lucky from time to time to get
this kind of conveniently served up kick in the rear end.
At Pearl Harbor we got it. We were able to recover from
Pearl Harbor because the oceans were wide, there were
other powers standing between us and our enemies, and
we had the enormous advantage of the industrial power
of the United States. I would like to know whether we
could recover from a nuclear Pearl Harbor. The very
existence of the Agency to which I belong was caused by
the investigation into Pearl Harbor which proved, after
the war, that a great many people in the United States
Government had little pieces of information, which if
they could have all been brought together into one central
place, maybe wouldn't have avoided Pearl Harbor but would
have made it a great deal less harmful to us than it was.
And thus it was decided to create a central repository for
this information.
Now there exists a widespread belief that the CIA
is sitting on one little private pile of information and
the Defense Intelligence Agency, the ONI and the Army G-2
on others. We are all working from the same data bank.
We are all working from the same facts. No, we don't
always agree. A military man always tends to view what
the enemy's capabilities are. Non-military people sometimes
put more emphasis on what his intentions are. The answer
is that you need both.
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We get a great deal of intelligence openly, through
open publications, through open broadcasts, through our
embassies, through public sources of all kinds, maybe
even half, or more than half, but it is the easiest half.
Then you get a considerable percentage through the great
technical systems that have been developed in the last
few years. But none of those will get you inside a man's
head. None of those will tell you what people are thinking
about. Only people can do that. And, you know, with that
same ambivalence I was talking about the Congress created
the CIA to engage in spying, to use the currently fashionable
opprobrious word, it was called collecting intelligence
previously. But they didn't say that. They said you will
do such other things as the National Security Council may
require.
Not long ago at the height of the discussion about
assassination we had some Congressmen out at CIA and there
was discussion of this question. Somebody said, "Well,
of course, if anybody could have gotten Hitler in '43 or
'44, he would undoubtedly have been the first. joint recipient
of the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Victoria Cross."
And one of the young Congressmen said, "Yes, but think if
you could have gotten him in '35 or '36 of how many lives
you would have saved." I said, "Congressman, do I under-
stand you are advocating assassination in peacetime?" He
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said, "Oh no, but that was different." It's different
because we know what happened subsequently.
One of the great German intelligence agents, Otto
Skorzeny, was tried by the Allies after the war and he
was accused of sending people in British and American
uniforms behind the British and American lines during the
war, a dastardly crime. Two British colonels and one
American colonel who had done the same thing with people
in German uniform testified on his behalf and the case
was thrown out of court, even in the immediate post-war
atmosphere of 1947. Moses sent spies into the land of
Canaan. As I said, it is the oldest profession. But
we need it today more than we've ever needed it before.
America in the past has always been unreachable
and therefore unbeatable. That is unfortunately no
longer true. In the years following World War II we
solved problems in one of two ways. We solved them either
by military force or we solved them by overwhelming
them with our great financial and economic resources.
We can't do that anymore. We need judgment, we need
understanding, we need the ability to establish a foreign
policy on a sound basis.
We do have a very large intelligence community,
but what does it cost the American people? I am not at
liberty to give you the figures, although the budgetary
process for the American intelligence organizations is
the same as for the Department of Agriculture or the
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Department of Commerce, within the Congress, within the
appropriations committees, within the Office of Management
and Budget. It is simply not made public. We have not
gotten that far into the Agnello business. People say,
"Why can't you make it public?" Well, if you made it
public for one year, nothing would happen. But if you
made it public over a series of years, you would have
bulges in it of major programs like the U-2 or the raising
of the Soviet submarine, and you would start an unraveling
process because people would ask why there were differences.
There is no other country in the world that discusses
its intelligence services as openly as we do. In fact,
in most countries they don't comment on it nor do they
discuss it. In our system we have decided to do so.
A foreigner said to me once, "You Americans are the first
people to have gone to the moon. You may well be the
first people to run your intelligence service in Macy's
window." Whether this is possible or not over a long
period of time, I do not know. I personally do not
believe it is.
I believe we can live with any form of oversight
the Congress chooses, but I would devoutly hope that
they would choose something like the Atomic Energy
Committee where you have a Joint Committee of both Houses
and which has been a model of discretion and responsibility.
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Right now we are reporting to seven different committees
which compose more than half the membership of both
houses of Congress. How you can keep anything secret
in that atmosphere I don't know.
John Jay, who ran the spies before the Revolution,
was once called before the Committee of Secret Correspondence
in the Congress and asked to lay before the Congress the
names of his spies and how much he was paying them. John
Jay's answer was, "Experience has shown that the Congress
is composed of too many people to have this kind of dis-
closure made to the whole body. Such disclosures in the
past have been fatal not merely to the project but to a
great many of the people concerned." And he got away with
it. Now as I say we've had this problem since the dawn
of our history.
Not long ago not far from here I was having lunch
with a former British Prime Minister, Lord Avon, Anthony
Eden, and he was discussing the difficulties an ancestor
of his had during the Revolution. Robert Eden was the
Royal Governor of Maryland. He was in trouble with the
British Government who thought he was overly sympathetic
with the Americans and he was in trouble with the Americans
who thought he wasn't sufficiently sympathetic with them.
So I said to Lord Avon, "Yes, that may be true, but in
the meantime his brother William in Paris had successfully
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penetrated Benjamin Franklin's office." "Oh," he said,
"You know about that, do you?"
When the French told Benjamin Franklin that France
was entering the war against Great Britain in 1779, that
information was in the hands of the British Government
42 hours later. And in those days if you rode a horse
from Paris to the coast, took a boat across the Channel
and rode from the Channel coast to London, it. would take
you about 42 hours.
You wouldn't believe some of the things the founding
fathers did in the past. I've looked into it in the year
of this 200th Anniversary of our Revolution, and some of
our do-gooders would have been very upset with some of
these people. Let me tell you about Benjamin Franklin,
for instance. Benjamin Franklin for three years before
the Revolution, when we were all loyal subjects of George III,
was the Assistant Postmaster of British North America. Do
you know what he was doing? He was opening that mail like
crazy. The British caught him, they took him to London,
they tried him before the Privy Council, and they found
him guilty. But before they could sentence him, he skipped
off to Paris. When he got to Paris, he designed and had
the French build him a printing press. Do you know what
he printed on the printing press? He printed some British
passports and some British currencies, but mostly he
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printed fabricated atrocity stories for insertion
in the British press.
Now George Washington who understood the value
of secrecy once wrote a letter to his Chief of Intel-
ligence in New Jersey, Colonel Elias Dayton, and this
is what he said: "The necessity of procuring good
Intelligence is apparent and need not be further urged--
all that remains for me to add, is, that you keep the
whole matter as secret as possible. For upon Secrecy,
Success depends in most Enterprizes of the kind, and
for want of it, they are generally defeated, however
well planned and promising a favourable issue. I am,
Sir, your obedient servant, George Washington."
One day in Connecticut, George Washington was
spending the night at the home of some friends, sym-
pathizers of the American Revolution, Mr. and Mrs. Holcomb,
and in the morning he thanked the Holcombs and climbed up
on his horse to ride on. Mrs. Holcomb came out to see
him off and she said, "General, pray where do you ride
tonight?" General Washington leaned down in the saddle
and he said, "Madame, can you keep a secret?" She said,
"Of course." He replied, "So can I, Madame," tipped his
hat and rode on.
The idea that the founding fathers were dying to
tell everybody everything is just historically inaccurate.
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They weren't. Thomas Jefferson once got a group of men
together and promised them five thousand pounds if they
would go behind the British lines and kidnap Benedict
Arnold. He said, "Don't go there and try to fight your
way in. That will get you in trouble." He said, "Win
his confidence and when you have worked your way in and
won his confidence, bring him to me so that this greatest
of traitors may receive the fate he so richly deserves."
You hear all about the opposition to our helping
our friends abroad--so-called covert action, dirty tricks,
or however they want to phrase it. I would just like a
few Americans to reflect on how they think we got Texas
or California or Hawaii. Americans should be the last
people to denounce covert action since the French had
17,000 men in North America before France declared war
on Great Britain during the Revolution. The Navy knows
all about the battle between the Bonhomme Richard and
the Serapis. What was the Bonhomme Richard? The Bonhomme
Richard was a French ship that was slipped under the table
to John Paul Jones, loaded with gunpowder and cannon, in
complete violation of the state of neutrality with which
France found itself with Great Britain at that time.
So they are trying to tell the American people that
something terrible happened that had never happened before.
Yes, there have been abuses. Yes, there have been wrong
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things done. But if you put that up against the fact
that we have provided our leaders with what I believe
is as good information as has been placed before any
government at any time in history. It isn't perfect.
There are a lot of things that go wrong. President
Kennedy once told us, "You are doomed to be pilloried
for your failures and to have your successes passed
over in silence."
What has the impact of all this been on us? I
would like to be able to tell you that all of this has
caused our foreign friends to shy away from us and have
nothing to do with us. That is not true. They are
steadfast and good friends and they have not done that.
They have understood that this is a difficult time with
us. We have assured them that we would not give away
secrets which were not American secrets which had been
entrusted to us by friendly foreign governments.
We have today four times as many young people
applying to work in the Central Intelligence Agency as
at any time in its history. We have a very small rate
of people leaving. Yes, we have lost some people. Yes,
we have lost some sources. But nothing like you would
imagine from the hullaballo that was created here. Of
course, I must say, the volume was louder here than
anywhere else. Most foreigners were somewhat puzzled
by this and wondered what these tribal penitential cyclic
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American rites are where we beat ourselves in the bosom
at regular intervals every 20 or 25 years.
Not long ago the Prime Minister of an Asiatic
country said to me, "How can I be on your side. Your
country is in complete disarray. Your President and
your Congress are squabbling like cats. You are making
a striptease of your intelligence service. How can I
be on your side?" I said, "Prime Minister, I am astounded
that an intelligent man like you could possibly fall into
the same errors as Adolph Hitler and William II in taking
seriously the cyclic penitential American tribal rites.
You must not be deceived by these." I was a young corporal
in the American Army in the summer of 1941. The Germans
had occupied all of Western Europe. They were moving
towards Moscow at 15 miles a day and the United States
Congress voted universal military service by a majority
of one vote. How do you think the Japanese read that
message? The existence of an effective intelligence
capability on the part of the United States and its allies
is one of the greatest deterrents against anyone attempting
any Pearl Harbor again. In the early '60s in this country,
we had a great debate about a missile gap, whether there
was a missile gap or not. That would be impossible today.
We know what they have and they know that we know what
they have.
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In the past intelligence has always been thought
of as part of making war on somebody. It is also a force
for peace. No one could sign an arms limitation agree-
ment if he didn't have the?means of verifying whether
it was being lived up to or not. And we have that means
of verifying. I think we have come through a very con-
siderable storm. I think we have come through it in
remarkably good shape. As far as I can tell you about
the people in the American intelligence community, in
CIA, in the Defense Intelligence, in Service Intelligence,
they are of good heart. They know what they are doing
is essential if we are to survive and they know that
if there is one thing that you cannot have at this time
in this century, it is to have your nation cruelly and
strategically surprised. If you look around at the
situation in which we and our allies find ourselves,
we cannot fail. If we do, who will pick up the torch
of human freedom. Thank you very much.
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