GUEST SPEAKER PROGRAM [ LIEUTENANT GENERAL VERNON WALTERS]

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80R01731R002000110005-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 30
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 21, 2003
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: June 8, 1976
• Content Type: SPEECH

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GUEST SPEAKER PROGRAM
8 June 1976
Lieutenant General Vernon Walters
INTRODUCTION
Distinguished guests, members of the Intelligence
Community, ladies and gentlemen. I am Harry Fitzwater,
Director of Training, and I welcome you to another of our
Guest Speaker presentations. Following General Walters'
remarks there will be a short intermission in which those
people who have to catch buses or leave may do so, and then
we will follow with a question and answer period.
This is the last of our Guest Speaker presentations for
this fiscal year, and I think it is very important and very
appropriate that we have with us as a speaker, a gentleman
who is concluding thirty years of colorful service in
the military. If you have had a chance to read General
Walters' biography, you have noted that it is studded with
many varied assignments. He entered the service as an
enlisted man in May of 1941, and if you have read that
biography, you have noted that he did a lot of things in
May. I don't know how all that came to be, but that's what
he did. He entered in May 1941, and he was commissioned as
an officer in May 1942. He came to us as our Deputy Director
in May 1972. He has had a very colorful career of some 30
years in military service in intelligence. He served with
many distinguished individuals who helped to make history.
He served as General Mark Clark's aide when General Clark
was the commanding General of the Fifth Army back in 1943.
He served as an aide and interpreter to General Marshall and
to three Presidents: Truman, Eisenhower, and Nixon. He
served in many military attache posts, one of most particular
significance as military attache-at-large for Ambassador Harriman.
He has the distinction of having served under four DCI's:
Messrs. Helms, Schlessinger, Colby, and Bush. He also has
the distinction of serving during the most tempestuous times
that the Agency has experienced. I think we can all say
that we are grateful for his assistance in helping us weather
the storm. So, this afternoon, let us reminisce with
General Walters on 30 years of military service in intelligence.
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GENERAL WALTERS
Mr. Fitzwater, thank you very much for lopping five
years off my service. It is 35, actually, but I am grateful
for small mercies. Also I feel somewhat intimidated by the
fact that, as I look through the speakers who have participated
in this Program, I find that I am the first non-doctor and
non-professor, and that I am not speaking on the profound
subjects on which they have spoken, but one of the things
that I will try to point out is that, at least in my lifetime,
being in intelligence has really been not only rewarding in
a material way, but fun!
I came into the Army in 1941 and I was immediately
interviewed by a Master Sergeant who was very impressed by
the fact that I spoke a multitude of languages. He sent for
a Major--and in those days, you know, Majors were pretty
divine beings--and he came over and was equally impressed.
This was about the time that the United States Army was
commissioning Mr. Knudsen, the head of General Motors, as a
Lieutenant General in the Transportation Corps, and David Sarnoff
of RCA, a Brigadier General in the Signal Corps and I thought,
"They'll probably make me a Lieutenant Colonel in Intelligence,
but if they offer me a majority, I'll take it since we'll
all soon be in the war and everybody will have to make
sacrifices." So we went on down this assembly line getting
shots and various other things, and finally we got to the
end and everybody was comparing MOS's and I said, "What's an
MOS?" Someone said, "That's your military occupational
speciality. That's what you're going to do in the Army."
So I thought the time had come for some of this leadership I
was going to be asked for so I turned to one of the other
guys and I said, "Go down and find out what 0506 is." It
worked like a charm. He almost saluted; he jumped up; he
went away and came back with a puzzled look on his face and
he said, "0506 is truck driver." And I said, "Somebody's
made a mistake." But nobody had, and guess who drove a
truck?
So, I drove a truck for a while and I finally went to
Officer's Candidate School. The only reason I went is that
there was just one vacancy in Military Police and I went
before this board that came up from Providence and they
asked me what I did for recreation and I said I skiied--I
was the President of the Fort Ethan Allan Ski Club. Well,
that absolutely transformed the president of this board who
was also a skiier and none of those New York State Troopers
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or policemen had a chance for that vacancy after that! I
was sent down to the Infantry School and I was told that at
the end of the Infantry School's three months I would go to
one month of military police training since there wasn't any
Military Police School yet. So, I went down to this infantry
thing and I went through three of the toughest: months in my
life. As we got toward the end I kept asking, "What about
this military police training?"; and I got evasive replies.
Finally they said, "Oh, there is a shortage of Infantry
Second Lieutenants and you are going to be one."
So, I was assigned to a new Division at Camp Shelby
where I was a Platoon Leader and subsequently a Company
Commander. At the same time, I was made the regimental
Intelligence Officer, which was a certain amount of dupli-
cation which theoretically wasn't supposed to happen, but it
did. I'll never forget how grateful I was to the Jewish
tailor in New Orleans who made Nazi insignia for me so I
could show the troops what it was going to look like! So I
was happily engaged in doing these two jobs when one day my
Colonel called me in and he showed me a telegram, a very
cryptic telegram which said, "You'll immediately dispatch
Lt. Walters to the military intelligence training center at
Camp Ritchie." I'd never heard of this, and he said, "How
can I create a new Division when they take people away from
me by name?" I wasn't anxious to go, because my job at
Shelby called for a Captain and I was a Second. Lieutenant--
and in those days it could happen in about three months!
Anyway, I was shipped off to Camp Ritchie and here was
a real reflection on the state of American intelligence in
peace time-or what was left of peace time. In. the United
States, we have always built up a great intelligence capability
during wars and we've always almost immediately dismantled
it thereafter. I am not now going to go into what I discovered
about the founding fathers with respect to intelligence.
That would be a subject for a second lecture. Suffice to
say they weren't against it and they did some things of
which the Church Committee would certainly not have approved...
not to mention the Pike Committee! But I guess they'd be
covered by the Statute of Limitations. I arrived at this
Camp Ritchie, which had an American Commandant, but the man
who was really running it was a British Colonel! The United
States was one year into the war and this U.S. Army Military
Intelligence Training Center, for all practical purposes was
run by a British Colonel. Well, we had a lot of crazy
exercises there and they were very good ones in some respects.
The farmers around there had signed some piece of paper
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allowing the Federal Government to use their land. What
they did not expect to see was a bunch of people in German
uniforms and with German weapons creeping across their
farmyards in the middle of the night. More than once we had
narrow escapes from angry farmers who said, "No, no, I just
said the U.S. Government; I didn't say you Germans could use
my farm!" This was where I first met Archie Roosevelt. We
were together on a team. On one exercise they'd dump you in
the middle of the countryside. They'd hand you a German map
of the area with all of the place names changed, and they'd
tell you to go to a certain place using the German name of
it. They wouldn't tell you the American name so nobody in
the area could tell you where it was if you asked them!
The first thing you had to do was find out where you were.
You had to walk until you came to a bridge or road or power
line or something else. I remember I was very good at this
and our team was never worse than third at getting back to
camp. One night I was really bewildered as to where we were
and Archie said, "Don't tell me you don't know where we are.
We'll never get back." But we did. If you got back, you'd
get some sleep; if you didn't get in until daybreak you had
to go to class shortly afterwards. One day, after we'd been
out all night and all day, at 5 o'clock there was great
turmoil and all the doors were closed and the phones were
cut off. We were going somewhere! I waited and then I
finally went to bed and said, "If I'm involved., wake me up."
In a little while, someone shook me and said "You're involved.
Get up." So I got up and we rode down in trucks from Camp
Ritchie to Fort Myer, where I now live, and I remember the
little towns we went through at 12 or 1 o'cloc:.k in the
morning. We were singing the "Horst Wessel" song, the
"Marseillaise" the "Internationale" and various other subversive
enemy songs--everybody was an expert in these things. The
great gagline at Camp Ritchie was "I am speaking 19 languages,
English the best. When do I make Master Sergeant?" In case
you all are wondering, our present Secretary of State was
there! As a matter of fact, I'll let you in on a secret
which shouldn't leave this building. He was a jeep driver
for Carl Wagner, who was my executive assistant!
So we went to Fort Myer where we were issued helmets--
the real new ones, not the old World War I type--and we were
told to go to Fort Bragg. We all went off to Fort Bragg and
I reported in to the G-2, 9th Infantry Division, and he
said, "What are all of you doing here? We're supposed to
see you at Newport News in 10 days." So we all took off and
went home or back to Ritchie and drove our cars home and did
all the other things we had to do.
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We sailed out from Newport News and I had a small
Intelligence detachment. I opened my orders after three
days at sea and found I was going to French Morocco, which
was a great surprise since all of us knew we were going to
Dakar. The orders said that when we got there I had the
initial duty--I hate to mention the word--to kidnap 16 crane
operators and bring them down to the dock during the night
so that when the ship sailed in the morning, we would have
the crane operators to unload the ships. I think I am
covered by the Statute of Limitations on that, too. By the
way, all of them came quite voluntarily and nobody was
injured. So we were aboard ship and we had a thing called
the Special Missions Detachment. We were universally
christened "The Missionaries" by all the other people on the
ship. Nobody really knew what we did and, as a matter of
fact, neither did we. But, one day the senior officer on
the ship called me down to his cabin. He had a box in front
of him on the table and in it was a tube-like affair. He
said, "Walters, you're Intelligence." And I said, "Yes,"
looking very mysterious, and he said, "What's this?" I
said, "I don't know," and he looked at me and said, "I
suppose you wouldn't tell me even if you did." It was a
bazooka but none of us knew what it was at that time. It
was a rather terrifying weapon in that the projectile had a
wire with a ring attached. There was considerable discussion
as to what what happen if this ring were pulled. Did it arm
the weapon, or did the weapon fire? We finally had a volunteer,
a Major Adams, to test it despite the fact that the ship was
combat-loaded with bombs and shells and so forth. He went
up to the Captain's Bridge and the Captain removed himself
to another part of the ship from which he could control it
in case anything happened. The Major pulled the ring and
nothing happened, so he stuck it in the tube and pulled the
wire and, of course, a tremendous flash came out of the back
of the tube and set fire to the canvas awning around the
Captain's Bridge, and the projectile went off into the sea.
We still didn't know exactly what it was, but we knew it
made a lot of noise and that if it hit something harder than
the water it probably would explode. The Captain forbade
any further experimentation on his ship.
Well, we got to the Moroccan coast and it was really
something out of one of those war movies. We were assembled
on the deck of the ship and we heard the President announce
that we had landed in North Africa. We all looked at one
another and said "Now we're in for it. Those people on the
dock are all listening." None of them were as it turned
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out. They played the Star Spangled Banner and to the tune
of other martial music we clambered down nets out of the
boats. I got on to a destroyer, a WWI destroyer that had
all its superstructure razed off and we sailed right into
the harbor. As we came in, we could see the French flickering
at us, obviously inquiring who we were. We didn't answer.
We got into the harbor but the destroyer ahead of us had run
aground. We pulled up to the dock and as we did, the French
opened fire. You know, we'd sat on benches at Fort Benning
and we'd seen puffs of smoke of varying sizes at some distance
from us but none of it was like this black-red, unpleasant,
noisy business that was taking place quite close to us. We
got ashore, figuring that moving forward was probably the
best thing to do. We had a Navy fire-control party with us
and we said to them, "You'd better do something about his or
we're all going to get killed." Actually we said it more
urgently than that! So they radioed out to sea where the
battleship, "New York," was standing. There was a tremendous
great flash and you could see these great Naval shells
coming in, which was astonishing to me. They hit about a
mile inland and we said, "My God, for twenty years all you
do is practice and you can't hit anything!" We got another
salvo from the French guns and I must say in credit to the
Navy that their 3rd salvo was right into the positions of
those French guns and they fired no more that night. So we
then quietly went about the kidnapping and picked up the 16
crane operators. Through good intelligence, we had very
accurate information on their movements. Incidentally, the
day before we landed, some planes came down from Gibraltar
and dropped the very latest intelligence on our deck so that
we had intelligence that was about 24 hours old. In inter-
rogating some of these French prisoners, the use of this
information so impressed them that they broke down and told
us a great many thing they otherwise would not have told us.
This was an example of how intelligence can be used to
obtain more intelligence.
At daybreak, I had about 200 prisoners on. my hands.
Supposedly I had a team of 6 people, all of whom spoke
French, but they were always being pirated by somebody and I
was down to 3 to handle 200 prisoners! I took them up to a
warehouse and they all wanted to go to the bathroom at once.
The only way I could figure to do this was in alphabetical
order, and, since I have suffered a great deal. from alpha-
betical lists, I said "All prisoners whose names begin with
Z, Y, and X take one step forward. We will get to the A's
and B's later." While I was in the middle of these prisoners,
someone stole my gun out of my holster. I was both embarrassed
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and frightened, so I called the prisoners together and told
them that someone had taken my gun and that I wanted it
back. I made many references to the Geneva Convention and I
said, "I'm going to turn out the lights for 60 seconds.
Don't try to rush us because there are four of us here with
leveled Tommy-guns and if we hear you attempting that, we're
just going to fire indiscriminately." We turned out the
lights for about 30 seconds and when I turned on the light
there were 6 pistols on the floor! All these :men had been
carefully searched, so things don't always go according to
the training manuals.
On another occasion, General Harmon, who was an extremely
violent man who commanded the Division, came in while I had
two prisoners who had been captured sniping in civilian
clothes. He said "Who are these people?", I said, "They are
snipers." He said, "Shoot 'em, shoot 'em.", and I said,
"General, let me talk to them. Maybe they'll tell us something."
He said, "OK, if you want to." So I explained to the prisoners
that they had violated the Geneva Convention and were subject
to unknown penalties which I preferred not to mention and
would they please tell me who was organizing the sniping.
They very hastily told me who was organizing the sniping and
we went up with a tank and got him. He was a :French Captain
whom I later met on a Commemoration of this day, the 8th of
November, under the Arc de Triomphe. He was a Brigadier
General and so was I, and it was faintly awkward.
I was sent forward to Rabat and, later, to Tunisia, but
before we got to Rabat we came to a place called Mazagan.
There was a river there and we figured that the French would
blow the bridge. When we arrived we found that the garrison
had withdrawn to the far side of the bridge and were making
preparations to resist. General Harmon said to me "Walters,
go up and tell those crazy Frenchmen we don't want to fight."
He said, "Go up in my half-track and stand up so they'll see
you coming in a friendly spirit." I was grieved by this,
but I got in the half-track and a Signal Corps Lieutentant
volunteered to come with me. I saluted him when he got in
and he said, "Why are you saluting me?" and I said, "You're
coming voluntarily." We got up to the bridge and the bridge
clearly was mined with wires running off the far side of
it. We went by a great big French flag and I was standing
up so I gave it a great big highball hoping that some hidden
sniper wouldn't shoot me. When we got to the bridge the
driver stopped and looked at me and I looked at him and,
frankly, it was a situation in which I was beyond speech. I
just pointed across the bridge! I weighed the differences
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between being blown up by the French on the bridge or
courtmartialed for cowardice by General Harmon, and I decided
that in one case I would simply be dead and in the other
case I would be dead and dishonored, and between the two I
preferred the former. Well, I got across the bridge and two
Frenchmen jumped up and announced that I was their prisoner.
I was so relieved at getting across the bridge that this
seemed like nothing, and I said, "Stop all this foolishness
and take me to Col. So-and-so immediately." Well, they were
rather surprised that I knew his name. I said "Where is he,
where is he?" and they said "Oh, his CP is up on the hill."
I said, "Get in and take me up there.", so they did and at
least I had a French uniform in the half-track with me. The
Colonel greeted me with a very glum expression and said,
"What do you want?" I said, "Colonel, I have come in the
name of the ancient friendship which has united our countries
ever since the beginning of our national life.'"' He said
"Don't give me that Lafayette stuff. What is it you want?"
"Well," I said, "We want you to go back and take up your
garrison duties while we go to Tunisia and throw out the
Germans." He said, "Don't you know that I have orders?" and
I said, "Colonel, if they gave you orders to spit on the
French flag, would you do it? Or would you look to see
where those orders came from?" It shook him a little bit so
I pressed home. I said, "Colonel, I have lived 10 years of
my life in France and you can't live that long in a country
without feeling. something for it. When I think that the
Germans are marching down the Champ Elysees as masters and
booting Frenchmen off the sidewalks..." His tears began and
I finally hit him with my double whammy which was, "Colonel,
every soldier you kill here, whether he be French or American,
will be one the less to march under the Arc d' Triomphe when
dawns the day of glory." He said "Stop." I took him back
to General Harmon who promptly made me a 1st Lt. and gave me
a medal, so that was a fairly profitable morning.
We then went on to Rabat where for 48 hours I was the
Military Governmor of Rabat. As a 2nd Lieutenant I ran
everything from requisitioning freezing space to policing up
the houses of ill-repute. But a US Colonel who had been a
volunteer in the French Army arrived and suddenly I was out
in the forest sleeping under my shelter-half again, Then
they sent me forward to Tunisia where I interrogated German
and Italian prisoners and found that what they told me at
Ritchie was interesting but didn't always correspond to the
actual situation. In the middle of that assignment they
hauled me back to Algiers and got me involved in the middle
of the Admiral De Long, De Gaulle, Giraud goings-on, which I
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tried to stay out of but couldn't. In the middle of that I
got a telegram saying I was to be sent back to Ritchie to
teach Prisoner of War interrogation. I came back via Great
Britain and spent a couple of days there. I returne3 to
Ritchie where I enjoyed about a three-month reign in triumph.
As the only returnee from the war, I could get away with all
kinds of lies and war stories and there was nobody who could
check them!
One day I got a phone call from the Pentagon. I was
then the head of the Italian Prisoner of War interrogation
section because we were preparing for the operation into
Sicily. A Colonel in the Pentagon called and said, "Lieutenant,
we want you down here tomorrow morning at 9 o'clock to take
a group of Portuguese Officers around the United States.
This is very important because we want them to give us bases
in the Azores." I said "Colonel, there must be some misunder-
standing. I don't speak Portuguese." He said., "No, but you
speak French, Spanish, and Italian and all that stuff.
You'll understand them." I said, "Colonel, I :love Carmen
Miranda's songs but I don't understand them," and he said,
"Lieutenant, there is a misunderstanding. You seem to think
I'm inviting you to be here!" So the next morning at 9
o'clock I reported down there and, fortunately,, the Portuguese
spoke French and Spanish and Italian. I got in an airplane
and rode with them for two months around the United States
showing them various things. What we were trying to do was
show them that we were strong. They didn't believe that we
would go into occupied Europe. When we got them to the
Curtis Wright factory in Buffalo and they saw the hooks on
the tail of the C-46's, and when they saw the 8-24's at Fort
Worth being produced on a visibly moving production line,
and when they saw Mr. Kaiser's ships at Long Beach being
launched 12 days after the keel was laid, they began to
believe that we might be going in. Well, that worked out
pretty well and I went back to Camp Ritchie. Later they
wrote a letter to the War Department saying that I spoke
Portuguese like the great author of the famous epic poem,
and about two weeks later some Brazilians showed up so there
was no question as to who would go with them but that great
Portuguese expert! I went around with them for a while and
I was meditating about everything that was going on and I
figured that at that age the three things that interested me
from a career point of view most were what we defined as the
MMand P Society--the Medals, Mileage and Promotion Society--
of which everyone was a member, admitted or not. I decided
that none of these things were to be had in the United
States and that if I wanted any of them I'd have to go back
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to the war. Of course, the man at Ritchie who had me didn't
want to let go of me until he got some more people back from
the war with even more fantastic stories! I went out to Ft.
Leavenworth with the Brazilians and went through the Command
and General Staff School. Curiously, the main problem our
class went through there turned out to be what was done a
year later at Normandy! It was a five-division landing on
the base of the Carentan Peninsula. Then I was ordered to
Rio do Janiero to take over the reconnaissance party from
the Brazilian division that was going to the European theater.
I went over with them and Mark Clark saw me and decided he
wanted me for his multi-lingual army. I took the Brazilians
back to Brazil, knowing they were going to come back later,
and I was sent back to be Gen. Clark's aide.
Being Gen. Clark's aide was very interesting. I guess
I learned more during those nine months than in any other
period in my life. I probably had more to learn at that
period of my life than at any other time. It was not the
easiest job in the world. Gen. Clark and I today have
spendid relations but we're both mellowed by old age. In
those earlier days it wasn't quite the same. Let me give
you an example of one of my problems. We were riding along
in a jeep and he turned to me and he said, "May I ask what
precautions you have taken for my safety against enemy air
attack?", and I said, "Why yes, General, The MP alongside
the driver in the jeep in the rear is scanning the sky to
the rear; the MP alongside the driver of the jeep in the
front is scanning the sky to the front, and I'm watching
whatever I can." He replied, "Of all the ridiculous,
farcical, theatrical, unmilitary, unworkable, childish,
fanciful systems I have ever heard in my life, that is the
worst. My dog, Pal, could think up a better system than
that." Since the dog was always getting lost, I was gravely
tempted to say, "General, why don't you ask the little
S.O.B. and see what he can do for you.",...but I didn't! He
continued, "And how are all these bright air-raid wardens of
yours going to notify anybody if they see anything?" Let me
put in as a parenthesis that neither Gen. Clark nor I had
seen a German airplane since Salerno, and neither of us had
recently talked to anybody who had seen a German airplane
since Salerno. I said "Yes, Sir. There's a siren in all
three jeeps and the first guy that sees it sounds the siren."
I got another series of adjectives, none of which he had
used the first time (I marveled at his vocabulary), winding
up with, "It is perfectly obvious to me that you have never
been strafed." I said, "General, in North Africa, where
there was a German Air Force, I had one of my men killed on
the beach. And in Tunisia, I was strafed 5 times in one day
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on the road between Tabarka and Medjez el Bab. (It was only
3 but there was no possibility that he could check on me.)
I thought, "Now I've got him." He turned to me with a
triumphant smile on his face and he said, "Is that so?
Well, it is perfectly obvious to me that you learned nothing
from it." Later on I worked up enough courage and I went in
and I said, "General, it's perfectly obvious to me that I
can't give you the type of service that you want and I
think, in all fairness to you and to me, it would be better
if you got an aide who could." He looked me up and down for
about 90 seconds and he said, "Walters, let's get one thing
straight. You don't quit whenever you feel like it. I fire
you when. I'm ready and I'm not ready." It wasn't until late
that afternoon that I realized he'd said something nice to
me, because if he had wanted to get rid of me, he could have
done so. It was a job that required great diplomacy and
tact. One day I was riding along with him and we came upon
a band of Italian partisans loaded with tommy-guns and belts
of ammunition. He said, Ask these birds if they know who I
am." I said to the men in Italian, "You recognize the
Commanding General of the Fifth Army, don't you?" They all
said, "Generale Clark," and we had a splendid day after
that! On the 5th of June we finally made it into Rome. The
senior aide who got lost on the way to the Excelsior Hotel
was fired and I became the senior aide because I knew the
way to the Excelsior Hotel. That night, about 3 o'clock in
the morning, I.couldn't sleep so I turned on the radio. I
heard the German radio giving the announcement of the Normandy
landing. I debated whether to wake up the General or not
and decided against it on the grounds that he probably
already knew. In the morning at 6 o'clock I want in and
said, "General, the landings began during the night." He
said,' "The sons of.bitches! They wouldn't let us have the
headlines for the fall of Rome for even one day." (It was
on page 5 or 6.') I stayed with him until the Brazilians
came, and I cannot say that my going to the Brazilians was a
pure accident. There was a certain amount of conniving
involved. Anyway, I went to the Brazilians and almost my
first experience was that the Corps Commander came down and
asked them if they could handle a particular action and they
said, "'Yes," and he asked them if they needed any help and
they said "No." So he walked out very pleased with his new
Brazilian Division. As soon as he walked out the door, they
turned to me and said, "Walters, you have to get us out of
this." I said, "Get you out of this? How do I get you out
of it? You said you could do it." They said, "Yeah, but
you can't say 'No' to the Army Commander." I said, "No, you
can't say 'No,' but you can ask for so much support he can't
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give it to you." The Brazilian General looked at me kindly
for a moment and he said, "Walters, If you're going to work
with us, you will soon have to learn the difference between
'Yes,' which means 'Yes' and 'Yes' which means 'No."' This
was one of my first discoveries in the field of intelligence:
That "Yes" does not always mean "Yes."
Well, I stayed with them until the end of the war, then
I went back to Brazil and was the assistant attache there
for awhile and then I got involved in the Bogot:azo, the
thing that Fidel Castro was first involved in in Colombia.
General Marshall and President Truman came to Rio and
General Marshall was going to the Pan American conference
and he had an Ambassador with him who spoke Spanish but the
Ambassador was meeting all his old buddies and they were
having a great conversation while General Marshall sat there
twiddling his thumbs. That lasted through two foreign
ministers' meetings whereupon the Ambassador was fired and I
was summoned to be interpreter. Then Mr. Truman came and
General Marshall turned me over to Mr. Truman. I always
remember, though, that at the Rio conference I was in civilian
clothes and General Marshall looked at me and lie said,
"Walters, are you going to wear that tie this afternoon?" I
was wearing a tie which was in conformity with my age at
that time. I knew he wasn't for it but I didn't know why so
I said,, "No." He said "That's good. This afternoon when
I'm talking and Eva Peron is there I want her to be listening
to what I'm saying and not looking at your tie!" When I
reported in to General Carter, one of my predecessors here,
who was General Marshall's executive officer at that time,
he received me in his villa wearing a bathrobe, and he had
stars on the shoulders of the bathrobe. I thought this odd,
but at that age I thought most generals were odd. They've
changed greatly since. So he explained to me what General
Marshall liked and didn't like and what I was to do and what
I was not to do and I said, "Thank you," and left. As I was
walking out the door, he said, "In case you wondered why,
I've never worn a uniform since I got them and, by God, I'm
going to wear them on something!"
That conference went off peacefully and the next year
General Marshall sent for me to go to the Bogota Conference
with him and I was living in the house with him when the
leader of the opposition was shot. This set off what turned
out to be a civil war. That afternoon the building was
surrounded. There was a lot of shooting; there were dead
people in the street outside, and it was very unpleasant.
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That was Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Sunday, I decided,
would be a good day to go to church, so I borrowed General
Marshall's car and he said, Now bring it back because I'm
going to need .it." I went down with a guy from the State
Department and we got into the main square downtown and
found that the Cathedral was closed. It filled me with some
unease that on Sunday morning in a South American city the
Cathedral was closed, but the State Department guy was very
striped pantsy and very calm and he said to the guy, "Drive
into the next square." We drove into the next square and as
we did, a wild fusillade broke out between soldiers in the
middle of the square and snipers in the building. I was
greatly distressed by this, but he said to the driver, "Stop
the car." I said to him, "Cecil, do you think this is a
good idea?", and he said, "Yes. People generally shoot at
moving cars; rarely at parked cars." I meditated on that as
I examined the texture of the carpet on the floor of the car
and the state of my shoe laces and after a little while the
square was empty of people and I said, "Don't you think we
can go to church now?", and he said, "Yes, we can go to
church." We told the driver and drove over to the church
and Cecil got out and started up the steps and without
actually turning around he said to the driver over his
shoulder, We will be in here about 45 minutes, come back
for us then." "Oh no, senor," said the driver rushing past
us, "Today I, too, am going to church!" Governor Harriman
was there and I took him down to the President's. To make a
long story short, we got shot at a couple of times and he
was most unmoved by this. He was reading a copy of the
sugar production of the Province of Pernambuco which he
found thrilling, when we got to the President's Palace there
were no sentries, so we walked inside. Obviously, we were
received with consternation. Finally we were taken up to
the President's and I will always remember Gov. Harriman,
one of our great liberals. As we banged on the door, the
butler opened the door in a white tie and armed with a
tommy-gun., and Mr. Harriman promptly took off his hat and
handed it to him! We went up to the President's and he
noted that he had invited 23 people to dinner and we were
the only ones who had shown up!
Shortly after that, he asked me to go to Paris with him
for the Marshall Plan. I spent two years there getting a
liberal education in labor, economics, banking, finance, and
all sorts of things of which I'd known nothing. Some of our
analysts will tell you that I still don't know too much.
Then I went with him to the Wake Island meeting between
President Truman and General MacArthur. It is not true that
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General MacArthur kept Mr. Truman waiting. It was an
interesting thing. General MacArthur was there when we
arrived and Mr. Truman arrived after us and I was a little
startled when Gen. MacArthur did not get up out of his jeep
and go over to the airplane until the President was on the
ground, and I noticed that he didn't salute him. Ten years
later, I asked Mr. Truman whether he'd noticed this, and
half-way into the question he said, "That he didn't salute
me? You're damned right I noticed that he didn't." He did
not believe the Chinese were coming into the war. Mr.
Truman said, "All our indications are that they are." He
said, "No, they are not. This is the hour of our strength,
not of our weakness. We no longer stand hat in hand." I
must say that he said in advance that he would do the Inchon
landing and he told Mr. Harriman the day he would do it and
he did it on that day.
I then came back to the United States to work for
Mr. Harriman again and then Gen. Eisenhower picked me up to
,take me to SHAPE with him, and I was attache for a number of
years. Then I was plucked out to go to things like the
Geneva Conference as Gen. Eisenhower's interpreter where he
made this offer of open skies: "You overfly us; we overfly
you, and I wish I could convince you of my sincerity. If
only God would give me the power to convince you." At that
there was a loud clap of thunder and every light in the
building went out. The Russians are still trying to figure
out how we did it!
Then I went to the Bermuda Conference with him and
there the Prime Minister of France got sick and the French
came to me and said, "Will you have General Eisenhower's
doctor come over and look at him?" I did and when he
ascertained the symptoms he said, "No, have Lord Moran,
who's Churchill's doctor go over and see him." So Lord
Moran went over and I moved away and they said,"No, we need
you. Stay here." So he examined the Prime Minister and he
said, "Prime Minister, you've got a very bad case of bronchitis
and you must stay in bed," and the Prime Minister said, "I
can't stay in bed. Everybody will think it is a diplomatic
illness." He said, "No, I will tell them it is not a
diplomatic illness." The Prime Minister said, "Well, I'll
tell you, if you promise me that I can go to the meetings
tomorrow, I'll stay in bed today." And Lord Moran looked at
him and said, "Prime Minister, prophecy is as difficult in
medicine as it is in the field of politics." The Prime
Minister got pneumonia and he didn't go anywhere.
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Then I came back to the United States and worked at the
NATO Standing Group which gave me great experience in dealing
with our Allies. The Americans in this Standing Group
wanted to put everything in writing; the British wanted to
put nothing in writing, and the French didn't care one way
or the other. I asked the French General why he didn't care
and he said, "Well, you see, you Americans have a sacrosanct
written constitution. You want it all in writing. The
British have no written constitution so they resist anything
in writing, and we French don't care because when the crunch
comes, everybody is going to do what he thinks is in his
best interest anyway."
Then I left and went to Italy and in Italy I had one
.experience that taught me to never underestimate the local
service. Before leaving I was briefed in this building by
General Cabell and I was briefed in the Pentagon by all
the intelligence specialists, and they stated that the
Italians had a pretty good intelligence service but they
hadn't got a great deal of money and they weren't in the
"big time." I got to Italy where they had a set-up which
would drive Sen. Church crazy, because the FBI, CIA, NSA,
and DIA were all the same person. He wore a monocle and
looked more like the Chief of Spies than anybody in "Scorpio"
or "Three Days of the Vulture" or anything else. I'd known
him in Italy during the war and I made arrangements for my
first visit to an Italian military unit in Milan. I started
off, and the Pentagon was in one of its economy frenzies so
I didn't take my driver with me since he was a civilian and
earned more per diem than I did as a full Colonel. I drove
up to the American base in Leghorn; spent the night, and the
next day I was lured away from the direct trip to Milan by
the memory of a great restaurant in Florence where they had
the greatest green lasagna I'd ever eaten. I thought, "What
difference does it make, my program doesn't start in Milan
until tomorrow," so I parked the car in front of the station
and walked two blocks to the restaurant. The green lasagna
was fantastic, and while I was eating, a man came up to me,
clicked his heels, and said, "Senor Colonello, there have
been several changes in your program and the Chief of Service
wanted you to get them before you arrived in Milan." Now,
since Florence is a city of 720,000 people and I'd looked in
the rear vision mirror and hadn't seen anybody following me,
I understood that what I was getting was a demonstration.
As he left he said, "Here are the changes, and you are the
guest of the Chief of Service." I couldn't pay the bill!
Fourteen years later, in my present capacity, I went back to
Italy. I finished my business in Rome on a Friday and, as I
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was not due in Paris until Monday, I rented a car and drove
to Florence. I parked the car and went for a walk with my
people after checking into the hotel. I remembered that
restaurant, so I went to it and the green lasagna was
fantastic. I called the waiter for the bill and, although I
was in civilian clothes he said, "Senor Generalle, there is
no bill." I said, "What do you mean there is no bill?" The
yo man at the next table stepped up and said, "General, I
am In order that you may know that in 12
years the service has not lost its skill, once again, you
are the guest of the Chief of Service."
I find I am running out of time, so I am going to have
to leap across the years quite fast. From there I was
transferred laterally to Brazil over my bitter protest
because I had a big empire in Italy and a small one in
Brazil. I arrived in Brazil to find Ambassador Lincoln
Gordon who had been at the Marshall Plan with me and who
knew I'd served with the Brazilians during the war. I went
in and I hope it wasn't truculently that I said, "Well, Mr.
Ambassador, here I am. What do you want from me?" He said,
"Three things: I want to know what is going on in the
military; I want to influence it through you, and most of
all I never want to be surprised." With pardonable immodesty,
when the coup came he was not surprised. Those behind it
were all my old buddies whom I'd known in Italy during the
war. No, I did not incite them into doing it, but they did
tell me they were going to do it and who am I to turn a deaf
ear under such circumstances? The Soviet Ambassador at that
point said to me, "Now they are going to make you a General."
I said, "Mr. Ambassador, you are sadly misinformed about the
United States. We do not make people Generals on the basis
of imagined services." Thirty-two days later they made me a
General, so he called me up and he said, "Walters, how do
you explain this?" I said, "The only way I can explain it,
Mr. Ambassador, is that I obviously had more professional
competence than I thought I did the last time I talked to
you." I used to have quite a lot of fun with him. He came
up to me one day at a parade and said, "The trouble with you
Americans is you never bother to learn anybody else's language."
Immediately I thought, "He hasn't read my autobiography like
I've read his." He said, "You demand that people speak
English to you, and you make no effort to talk to them." I
said, "No, Mr. Ambassador, that may have been true twenty
years ago but it isn't true any more." And he said, "Yes,
it is true, and as a people you have no gift for languages
like we Slavs." At that point I said, (Russian language
segment omitted). That shook him, and I stepped in for the
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kill and that's when disaster struck. I said to him in
Russian, "Mr. Ambassador, would you like to try Portuguese?",
knowing that I spoke it much better than he did. He looked
at me and he said, "Walters, you may be good soldier, but
diplomat you are not!" You'll be glad to know that he is
now the Soviet Ambassador to Bangladesh.
Then I was told I had to go to France as attache and I
thought, "My God, I'm stuck in this attache circuit." So I
told the Chief of Staff this and he said, "May I ask you a
question?", and since he was the Chief of Staff I said,
"Yes." He said, "Has it prejudiced your career much?" I
was then a Brigadier General so I said, "No." He said, "0K.
Go!", so I said, "Well, you have to let me go to Vietnam
first," and he did, which was interesting from. the point of
view of the French. When I got to France, I almost immediately
fell into the student riots, and I was having grave difficulty
with all my colleagues in the Embassy who thought that this
was the end. I did not. I said, "The General has all the
trumps--the loyalty of the Armed Forces and the Gendarmes--
and that's all he needs." The day he finally 'banged the
door and said, in essence, "Everybody is going back to work
and all this nonsense is stopped," I knew that everybody
else would send in the text of what he said, so I sent one
of my shortest telegrams. I said, "This afternoon at
4 o'clock General De Gaulle played the trumps referred to in
my previous message." I had been at the U-2 Conference with
General Eisenhower and General De Gaulle and I must say they
behaved very well there. When I met De Gaulle after I
arrived in Paris in 1968, he recalled to me the name of the
village where I'd met him in Italy before. There I'd been
told he didn't speak English, so I translated what he said
loosely with additions like "He says, 'No,' but I think if
you push him he'll give," or "He says 'Yes,' but I don't
think he wants to do it." Since I'd read in Life Magazine
that he didn't speak English, I felt quite safe, but at the
end he stood up and he said, "General Clark, we have had a
very interesting conversation. It is my devout hope that
the next time we meet, it will be on liberated soil of
France." He turned, tapped me on the shoulder and said,
"Walters, you did a good job," so presumably 1 was not
totally incorrect, but that made me very cautious about
fooling with people's translations.
I arrived in Paris at a very awkward time. The French
had put us out and closed the bases and everything else.
Later on, the retired head of the French Intelligence Service
said to me, "When you came here with this long French background
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we were convinced that the Americans had sent you here to
stir up the Army against General De Gaulle for NATO, so we
watched you very closely. The fact that you were a bachelor
gave us two possible handles we could get hold of you with,
but when neither of them worked out, we decided that you
were like the traditional bishop--never in your own diocese."
Before I left France, I got into both the missile silos and
the submarine pens. Then, while I was in Paris, I got
involved in the mysterious adventures of Henry Kissinger.
(I'm worried about the time, because I'm running late. I
remember once going to a eulogy on a French General and
half-way through the sermon, the priest was getting very
agitated. I asked him why afterwards and he said, "Well, it
was twenty minutes to eleven and he was still only a 2nd
Lieutenant and he had to become a Marshal of France!")
Well, anyway, one day Kissinger took me to meet. some North
Vietnamese and started some negotiations with them which I
conducted for a very long time. I had strict instructions
that nobody was to know about this, and I was terrified that
STAT either the legal attache would report that I was dealing
with the North Vietnamese
STAT
i:)ut it all
worked out all right. This went on for quite a long time
and they are really the most unpleasant people to deal with.
When I got into dealing with the Chinese, which was a little
later, then it was easier. I was once called 1:ack here by
President Nixon and told that he wanted to get in touch with
the Chinese, and I was to deliver a message to them, so I
went back to Paris. I went to watch the Chinese Embassy
three mornings in a row and I saw the Ambassador leave at
8:30. On the 4th morning at 8:20 I pushed open the door and
said, "I am the American Military Attache; I have a message
for your Government from my President." I had made one
previous pass at the Chinese military attache in the Polish
Embassy when I had him alone and when I gave h:i.m this message
he looked at me in absolute horror and said, "I'll tell
them," and ran! This time they received me and they took me
in and we got involved in long discussions. I had many,
many visits with them and many negotiations about Henry's
trip and the President's trip and everything else. Several
times there were attempts to change the venue, but the
Chinese refused to change it. As a little matter of historical
interest, I asked them to release Fecteau and Downey. I was
back in the United States when the answer came, and they
told that they would do it. They're very curious
about the United States, so I finally gave them a World
Almanac and I'm sure they got 500 intelligence reports out
of it.
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The first time I took Henry to see them, smuggling him
in was a major operation. He went in and as we left he
said, "Tell me, when you come to see them, is it the same?",
and I said, "Oh, no. When I come to see them, I'm met at
the door of the gate by a low-ranking guy; at the door of
the building by a medium-ranking guy, and then I'm taken
into the Fu-Manchu Room which is all red velvet and Chinese
lanterns and gold where I sit for 90 seconds. Then the
Ambassador appears in the door and says, 'Ni hao,' and I
say, 'Ni hao.' When you went in, the two guys were at the
gate and the Ambassador was waiting on the steps, and you
got both background music and incense which I never get." I
saw a smile of quiet satisfaction spread over his face at
the evidence that even in this egalitarian society there was
some respect for hierarchy.
I am going to stop on this one. One night he was to
come over to France and I was to bring him to Paris. At the
beginning of this he said, "Do we have to tell the French?",
and I said, "Yes. They're watching the Chinese; they're
watching me; they're watching everybody, and they'll know."
He said, "How do we prevent it from spreading?"', and I said,
"You go to Pompidou and you ask him to keep it in the very
upper level of French Intelligence." Se we did. On the
night he's to arrive I am to go to Bourges in central France
where he's going to land and I'm to bring him by car to
Paris. At about 5 o'clock in the evening I begin to get
these frenzied telephone calls from the White House: "There's
something wrong with the airplane's hydraulic system; we
don't know whether the airplane's going to land; Rogers is
going to find out; Laird is going to find out; they will
break off the negotiations; do something!" I said, "How can
I do something? I can't cover the whole of Western Europe.
You've got to tell me where the airplane is goring to land."
At 9 o'clock, they called me and told me that the airplane
was going to land at Frankfurt, which was the worst possible
place from their point of view of security, but actually the
best place because they had arresting gear at the end of the
runway like on a carrier to stop the airplane in case the
brakes didn't work. So I walked down the street to President
Pompidou's office and asked to see him, and this caused some
consternation. Fortunately, I had taken him on a trip
around the United States shortly before and they'd seen me
on television, so I got in and I explained the situation and
he picked up the phone on his desk. He called his airplane
out at the private hangar and then he said, "Go out there.
My airplane will take you. Pick him up and bring him back
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here." I drove out there and one hour and six minutes after
I left Pompidou's office we were airborne, which I thought
was pretty good reaction time. As we flew towards Germany,
I thought, "If this airplane crashes, I will have been
defecting to the Soviet Union in a French airplane and, once
again, I will be dead and dishonored." I had no orders; I
had no nothing for this. We landed at Frankfurt behind his
airplane. We taxied over and I walked up into the airplane.
The great man was sitting in the chair. He looked up at me
and half a smile came over his face. He said, "Jesus Christ,
am I glad to see you. What are we going to do now?", so I
said, "Well, walk down the ladder and go up the ladder into
that little French airplane. We'll move the baggage." So
he did, and we started back to Paris and the French pilot
called me up front and he said, "General, this is the President
of France's airplane. The Germans know it. This airplane,
without clearance and without flight plan managed to penetrate
German airspace, land at Frankfurt, spend 9 minutes on the
ground and return. Tomorrow morning the Germans are going
to be in my office wanting to know what we were doing there."
I would like to tell you that I had a snap answer. I didn't.
I thought about it and finally a brilliant idea struck me.
This was before any of the recent events in Washington. I
said, "Tell them it involves a woman. They'll. believe it of
the French and be discreet." But he said, "What if Madame
Poupidou finds out?" I said, "If Madame Pompidou finds out,
I give you my word of honor as an American Army Officer, I
will tell her the truth." He said, "Fine." Six months
later I saw him and I said, "Calderone, did the Germans
ask?" He said "Yes." I said, "What did you tell them?" He
said, "I told them what we agreed." I said, "Did that
satisfy them or did they have any other questions?" He
said, "They had one other question." I said, "What was
that?" They asked, "Is she German?"
Well, sometime thereafter, on the 2nd of May, I was
assigned to this job. I am about to leave it,, and people
say to me, "What is it like? Was it worth it?" The answer
is an overwhelming "Yes!" They have been four of the most
challenging, rewarding years of my life. The people I have
met here have been magnificent. I am proud of my association
with this Agency as I am of the years I spent in the Army.
When I had my confirmation hearings, Senator Stennis asked
me what my ambitions were and I said, "Mr. Chairman, when I
came into the Army, my ambition was to make Major. If you
don't confirm me and I retire as a Major General, I will
have had one of the most rewarding careers of anybody who
ever wore an American Army uniform." In the Army, and in
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STAT
this Agency, on the many silent battlefields upon which we
have been called as a people not through our own choice to
fight, I have truly had more than my share. I would like to
take this opportunity, before probably the largest gathering
I will have the opportunity to talk to at the Agency, to
thank you; to congratulate you on producing the finest
intelligence in the world under a bombardment without
precedent in American or any other history, and to tell you
that wherever I am, my heart will be with you. I wish you
every success because the success of this Agency means the
survival of this nation and freedom in the world. Thank you
very much.
Questions and Answers
Well, if anybody wants to shoot any questions, I am
glad to attempt to answer. I hope you realize that I had to
condense about 20 years into about 5 minutes, but that last
story, the rescue of Henry Kissinger, I just couldn't leave
out. I had to fit that one in even though chronologically
it would have come further down.
(Question) "Would you say a little about your part in the
release of Downey and Dick Fecteau?"
(Walters) "There isn't any more to say than that. Just
that we asked them. I was instructed to ask for them."
(Question) "What were you?"
(Walters) "I was in Paris. I was the Military Attache and
I was dealing with Huang Chen who is now the Chinese head of
the liaision office here, and I asked him. He was very
noncommittal and simply said he would transmit it. It took
quite a while. I would say it was three or four weeks
before we got an answer, and they said they'd release them
at different time frames and so forth. I was in the United
States. The only other person who was privy to these
negotiations was and she was the name I'd given
them and they called er in. I believe she was skiing. She
was off skiing on the weekend--feeling that with me gone the
mice could play--and she had to come back from her skiing
weekend to get the message but it was that simple, and it
was not in any detail or anything else. We'd just asked
them, saying it would be a great gesture in connection with
the President's visit if they would do it. It was a request
from him. About four weeks later they said they they would
do it, but they would do it in phases, one after the other.
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 Approved For Release 2003/08/25 : CIA-RDP80R01731 R002000110005-7
(Question) "What kind of things were you going to say that
you haven't said yet?
(Walters) "0h, quite a lot. Quite a lot. For instance, I
could tell you about the U-2 Conference. The U-2 Conference
met in Paris. De Gaulle had called it after the U-2 was
shot down. He saw General Eisenhower beforehand and told
him that he'd talked to Khruschev and that Khruschev was
going to demand an apology, and that he, De Gaulle, had told
him that there was just no way that the President of the
United States could do this and so forth and so on. The
appointed day came and we sat there at a four-sided table
with De Gaulle on that side; the Americans here; the Russians
there, and the French there. They told me not to wear a
uniform since this was supposed to be a peace-loving conference.
Immediately adjacent to me was Marshal Malinovsky wearing
46 medals including the Legion of Merit. President Eisenhower
whispered in my ear, ".I hope it's not his finger that's on
the button." De Gaulle said, "Since General Eisenhower is
the only Chief of State other than myself who is present, I
will give him the floor first." Khruschev said, "I asked
for the floor first." They said, "OK," so he got up and
with trembling hands, he read this long tirade about how
he'd been overflown. De Gaulle interrupted him and said,
"But I've been overflown by you.", and Khruschev said, "By
your American allies maybe, but not by me." And De Gaulle
said, "What about that Sputnik you put up with such pride a
couple of days ago? Eighteen times yesterday it crossed the
sky of France. How do I know you didn't have cameras on
that?" Khruschev looked absolutely appalled. He held up
his hands and he said, "God sees me. My hands are clean.
You don't think I would do a thing like that?" So De Gaulle
said to him, "What about those pictures of the far side of
the moon you showed us with such pride?" And I