DCI ADDRESS TO THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB OF CALIFORNIA IN SAN FRANCISCO ON 7 MAY 1975

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP82B00871R000100060007-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 10
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 22, 2006
• Sequence Number: 7
• Publication Date: May 6, 1975
• Content Type: MF

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USIB/IRAC-D-2.9/5
6 May 1975
15
UNITED STATES INTELLIGENCE BOARD
INTELLIGENCE RESOURCES ADVISORY COMMITTEE
MEMORANDUM FOR USIB PRINCIPALS
IRAC PRINCIPALS
SUBJECT: DCI Address to the Commonwealth Club
of California in San Francisco on
7 May 1975
The Director of Central Intelligence has requested that his
address to the Commonwealth Club of California on "Foreign
Intelligence for America" be circulated for the information of
USIB and IRAC Principals.
Executive Secretary
tD/C : Pages 2
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Office of the Assistant
to the Director
[phone]
[phone] (night)
(Advance for Use After 12:30 p.m., Pacific Daylight Time - 3:30 p.m., EDT)
FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE FOR AMERICA
Address to the
Commonwealth Club of California
by
William E. Colby
on
Wednesday, 7 May 1975
in
San Francisco, California
As usual, I am happy to be in San Francisco to renew my enthusiasm
for this beautiful Bay Area. But I am happy to be with you for another reason,
to discuss with this influential audience the reality of American intelligence
today.
One reality, of course, is the degree of attention being focused on
American intelligence. A number of critics, joined by a very few ex-employees,
are attacking us for a wide variety of alleged and imagined sins. Even the
most tangential connection with CIA brings a story from page 7 to page 1 of
many of our newspapers. The CIA's activities in the United States are being
investigated in depth by a Vice Presidential Commission. Select Committees
of the Senate and the House of Representatives have been established to con-
duct the broadest and most intense investigation ever made of the American
intelligence structure.
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The result is that the American public is concerned and confused about
American intelligence. Our American public, with its basic good sense,
recognizes that it would be dangerous to live without intelligence in a world
in which we are thirty minutes away from an aimed and cocked nuclear
missile. At the same time, the proliferation of these sensational charges
have led this same American public to wonder whether our intelligence serv-
ice has not become itself a threat to the Republic and its ideals.
This confusion must be clarified. The investigations being made in
depth and in detail by the Vice President's Commission and the Select Com-
mittees of the Congress will help in this process. But these investigations
and deliberations will require time, and in the interim the American public
deserves a reply to the more sensational charges made about its intelligence
service.
We cannot allow the public's perception of this essential service to be
dominated by the missteps, few and far between, which it may have made
over its twenty-seven-year history. I have admitted such errors, and we
have taken steps to correct them and prevent their recurrence. I have also
insisted that our discussion of them must not lead to a hysterical focus on
the nits and picks of yesterday to the extent we injure intelligence today and
block its improvement to meet the needs of our country in the world of
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tomorrow. I believe the old saying of not throwing the baby out with the
bath water is very germane to this current situation.
Thus, I welcome this opportunity to contribute what clarification I can
to public understanding of the reality of our intelligence today. I do it as an
American, conscious of our nation's need for protection and also of our ideals.
I also speak as a professional intelligence officer familiar with the changes
which have occurred within American intelligence over the years. I believe
very firmly that American intelligence can be responsible and accountable to
the American people and to its elected representatives, and at the same time
maintain those secrets which are essential to its contribution to our country.
It is a professional service which must reflect our national principles, but
which also has certain attributes inherent in its own nature. Its needs for
discipline, secrecy and organizational integrity are no more in conflict with
our free society than those of our military and diplomatic services.
First, intelligence has changed. Most of us have grown up with an image
of intelligence derived from the experiences of Nathan Hale, Mata Hari, James
Bond, and perhaps Maxwell Smart. But this image is no longer valid today.
The clipper ships, covered wagons and steam locomotives which brought your
forefathers to San Francisco were indeed transportation, but their image
hardly reflects modern transportation with its 747's in the sky, tractor.-trailers
on the interstates, and giant tankers on the sea. Modern intelligence has
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changed as much from its old images as modern transportation has from its
early exemplars.
The key feature of modern intelligence is that it is an intellectual
process. It collects masses of information about the complex and changing
world in which we live. Some of this information comes from those open
sources which you read in the press, from the comments of American travelers
and businessmen dealing with foreign affairs, and from the public statements
broadcast by other countries to their own people. To these has been added a
great new dimension of intelligence, the collection of information by technology.
This now allows us to see, hear, and sometimes even touch information
previously totally inaccessible and in quantities hitherto totally unmanageable.
The technical genius of Americans, especially many here in the Bay Area,
has given us new vantage points from which literally we can look at the world
around us and understand the meaning contained in hitherto incomprehensible
electronic phenomena. Where it is yet necessary to obtain information essential
to us but concealed by a closed society, we may still have to use the old clipper
ship of clandestine collection, but it has been streamlined and powered to a
new order of productivity. On many occasions, clandestine collection allows
us to bridge a gap of years between the initiation of developments in the minds
of foreign leaders or in their research laboratories and their appearance on
test beds or in diplomatic demarches.
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But this mass of information must be analyzed and assessed, and this
process too has changed. The computer has become a major tool of intel-
ligence, replacing the trench coat or the cloak. Beyond this, our intelligence
doctors and masters of arts and sciences, in a variety of disciplines from
agricultural economics to nuclear physics, assess thousands of jigsaw pieces
of information and order them into reasoned appreciations and conclusions.
This "faculty' of our Intelligence Community would be the envy of any large
university.
The very role of intelligence has also changed from the day in which the
spy stole a secret, gave it to the General, who won a battle. Today intel-
ligence conclusions about foreign situations and their likely course of develop-
ment cover the political, the military, the scientific, and the economic fields.
The information is of course used to warn us of imminent -- and future --
threats to our country. But it also helps our country to develop its foreign
policy on a basis of carefully reasoned knowledge, rather than emotion,
ignorance or misunderstanding. A most rewarding contribution is its positive
peace-making or peace-keeping role, where it provides the information
necessary to agreements to restrain arms buildups among the major powers
or to defuse potential combat between two of our friends about to strike
blindly at one another through suspicion and error.
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A most interesting change in American intelligence is in its customers.
The Generals and Admirals still use it, but so do our Presidents, Secretaries,
and Ambassadors. Congressional committees and members are regular
recipients of its product, and an increasing number of serious journalists and
other commentators on the world scene are finding that an hour or two at CIA
in an unclassified background discussion of a foreign situation can give balance,
objectivity, and accuracy to the conclusions they lay before the public. Thus,
American intelligence provides its product to all the participants in American
decision-making -- the executive branch, the Congress, the press, scholars
and the public at large. Many of our intelligence conclusions can be provided
when our sources need not be revealed and where we can be insulated from
the political arena, so that our judgments may be independent and objective,
not partisan.
Public opinion and our critics might accept this changed reality of
American intelligence but still question whether we work under adequate con-
trols and limits. Following the centuries-old tradition abroad that nations
conduct but do not discuss intelligence, the laws which in 1947 established
today's permanent structure of American intelligence were deliberately phrased
in circumlocutions and left broad gray areas.
All this has obviously changed. My presence here today, speaking
publicly about intelligence, is only one reflection of the difference between
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my job in our country and that of my colleagues in other nations, where my
counterparts are not even identified. Last week I participated in the third
session this month of intensive questioning by an Appropriations Committee
on next year's Intelligence Community budget, and we haven't even gotten to
the details of CIA's own request. These requests have been gone over care-
fully by the Office of Management and Budget and by the Armed Services and
Appropriations Committees' staffs and will be the subject of additional hear-
ings and questioning of me and a number of my subordinates. Our regular
Congressional oversight committees conduct periodic and detailed hearings,
some 26 in 1974 and 13 so far this year. I have undertaken an obligation
with them not only to respond completely to their questions but to advise
them of matters they might not know to ask about. In addition, both by recent
enactment and by Congressional committees' insistence on their jurisdiction,
we intelligence professionals appear before a variety of other Congressional
committees with respect to specific aspects of our work.
In addition to this regular supervision, we also will be investigated in
depth by the Senate and House Select Committees, which will also examine
the degree of control and supervision. The Vice President's Commission
will report its findings early next month after looking deeply into the adequacy
of external and internal controls over our activities. I fully support procedures
to ensure supervision, control and accountability with respect to intelligence.
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I only plead that these procedures also. take into consideration the unique and
fragile character of many sensitive intelligence operations.
But what of all the stories of secret political and paramilitary operations?
,S";.,!'s
Certainly theseAwill also be investigated, and I am confident that it will be
demonstrated that any such activities in past years were conducted under
legal authority then existing, reflected the political climate of those times,
and were carried out according to properly constituted procedures. As I have
said separately, we have very few clandestine operations other than pure
intelligence collection these days. This is the result of the changed world in
which we live, but I must point out that this changed world seems to be changing
again. Our country might again need the capability to provide some quiet
influence or assistance to friends abroad without engaging the formal diplomatic
or military might of the United States.
Am I merely defending American intelligence today? No. I am asking
that it be strengthened. I am asking that its basis of understanding and support
among the American people, in the Congress, and with the press, be increased.
I am asking that its laws and guidelines be clarified so that we in the intel-
ligence profession are given a clear expression of the mission the American
people and Government wish us to undertake. I ask that procedures for super-
vision, control and decision-making about American intelligence be reviewed
and clarified so that each of us -- citizen, representative, official, and
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intelligence officer -- share in the responsibility for the conduct of American
intelligence along the lines we think proper. I ask that the structure and
interrelationships among intelligence and the other agencies and bureaus
serving our people be understood and agreed. And I ask that the necessary
secrets of intelligence be preserved in the interest of the nation, not just of
the intelligence profession. We believe these secrets need better laws, and
especially we need to arrive at a consensus that we Americans do have some
national family secrets which must be kept. To make an open book of our
intelligence sources is to invite steps -- many quite simple -- to deny us
information vital to our nation's welfare or safety.
These steps, then, would strengthen this result of American intellect,
technology, and dedication called intelligence. Out of this effort to investigate,
clarify and strengthen American intelligence this coming year, we can make
a great contribution to the profession of intelligence worldwide. We can plainly
show that its essential contribution to our nation's safety and the welfare of
our citizens can be fully compatible with the ideals and procedures of our free
and constitutional American society. With this accomplished, we in the intel-
ligence business can then get back to full-time work following the guidelines
adopted and accepted by our people and their representatives.
Thank you very much.
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