REMARKS OF WILLIAM J. CASEY DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE BEFORE THE 64TH ANNUAL CONVENTION OF THE AMERICAN LEGION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP83M00914R002700210008-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 10
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Sequence Number: 8
• Content Type: REPORT

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REMARKS OF WILLIAM J. CASEY
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
before the
64TH ANNUAL CONVENTION
of the
AMERICAN LEGION
Chicago, Illinois
24 August 1982
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Fellow veterans gathered for this 64th annual national convention of the
American Legion, it is a privilege for me this morning to share the platform
with Governor Thompson, Mayor Byrne, your great National Commander Jack Flynt,
and later, I understand, with the great Chairman of the Senate Armed Services
`committee, John Tower.
I particularly appreciate at this time the chance to talk to you about
our national security posture and the many ways our interests, our friends,
our safety and our leadership are threatened around the world.
Today, it has become widely recognized that we have in the Soviet Union
a powerful and determined adversary which is carrying on a huge military
buildup to which it devotes over twice as much of its national effort as we
and our allies are able to devote to our own defense.
But what is not so widely recognized is the ability and the will that the
Soviets have demonstrated in recent years to project their power over great
distances. We have seen them bring planes and sophisticated weapons as far as
Angola or Ethiopia to meet troops brought in from Cuba. We see Soviet chemical
warfare weapons employed on the Arabian Peninsula and in Indochina. We've
seen Soviet planes and troops come across the mountains into Afghanistan.
Still less widely recognized is the Soviet ability and will to project
its power worldwide through subversion and insurgency and the adept use of
proxy forces, arms sales, and thousands of military advisers scattered around
the world.
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Recently I had our cartographers prepare a map to show the Soviet
presence in its various degrees of influence. They colored in red on a map
of the world the nations under a significant degree of Soviet influence.
When this map was finished, 50 nations were in red. Ten years ago, in
a similar map I had prepared, only half as many of the nations of the world
were colored in red. In those ten years, between 1972 and 1982, four nations
Iave extricated themselves from Soviet grasp, and 25 nations either fell under
an increased degree of Soviet influence or faced an insurgency backed by the
Soviets or their proxies. Each of the eleven nations now faced with insurgencies
throughout the world today, supported by Cuba, Libya, the Soviet Union or
South Yemen, happens to be close to the natural resources or to the sea lanes
on which the United States and its allies must depend to fuel and supply their
economic life.
It's not hard to understand how all this has come about. Time and again,
we've watched agents of the Soviet Union, the Communist apparatus, move in to
exploit underlying social and economic discontents, which are plentiful around
the world. This became the basis for their expansion with training and massive
weapons. With this help, local insurgents attack economic targets and drive
out investment. This further heightens the political and economic discontent
on which this kind of thing feeds. As this discontent grows, more people go
over to the insurgents, which makes them bolder, stronger and more difficult
to deal with.
Now there are still more subtle and less widely understood threats. One
is the monster known as international terrorism. The Soviet Union has provided
funding and support for terrorist operations via Eastern Europe and its client
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nations like Libya and Cuba. With at least tacit Soviet approval, many
terrorist groups have trained together in Cuba, Libya, Iraq, South Yemen,
Lebanon and the countries of Eastern Europe.
Now even if the Soviet Union withdrew its patronage of terrorism, this
activity would certainly continue, perhaps unabated. The fact is that terror
.has many patrons. Terrorist training camps, for example, are the largest
industry in Libya, next to oil. This international terrorism has taken on a
life of its own. When enough terrorists are armed. and trained, they have to
kidnap and rob to get the money to carry on what has become a big business.
And they need to assassinate and plant bombs to keep up the morale of their
followers and to make propaganda for their causes.
Another threat is the ability of the Soviet Union, largely through its
intelligence arm, the KGB, to insidiously insert its policy views into the
political dialogue in the United States and other foreign countries. The
KGB is adept at doing this in a way that hides the Soviet hand as the
instigator.
We see Soviet authored or inspired articles surreptitiously placed in
the press around the world, forged documents distributed, manipulation of
indigenous foreign Communist parties, international and local Communist-front
organizations, and clandestine radio operations, all employed aggressively
to erode trust in the United States as the leader of the free world.
Late last year, for example, delegations attending an important security
conference in Madrid received copies of a forged letter allegedly sent by
President Reagan to King Juan Carlos of Spain. This letter cited "Highly Secret
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Information" advising the King that several of his staff were opposed to Spain's
joining NATO and urging that the King move against them. Obviously, this
forgery was intended to disrupt Spanish-US relations and to provoke internal
opposition to Spain's joining NATO.
This type of thing has been repeated again and again in examples that
cannot be discussed in an open forum, but which have been laid out in closed
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sessions of Congressional committees.
Still another low-key but highly damaging threat can only be called a
hemorrhage. Only recently have we established the degree to which accuracy,
the precision and the power of Soviet weapons, which we are required now to
counter with budget-busting appropriations, are based on Western technology to
a far greater extent than we ever dreamed. The Soviet political and military
intelligence organizations, the KGB and the GRU, have for years been training
young scientists to target and roam the world to acquire technology for their
military arsenal from the United States, Western Europe, Japan, anywhere they
can get it. They have acquired in this way technology worth many billions,
some of it by purchase, legal or illegal, or by theft, by espionage, by
bribery, by scientific exchanges and by exploiting our open literature and
our Freedom of Information Act. The damage to our national security becomes
all too obvious as we face the need to spend billions of dollars to defend
ourselves against new Soviet weapons, in which a great deal of time and effort
has been saved by leap-frogging development stages and in which new power and
accuracy has been achieved through use of our guidance and radar systems, our
bomb and weapon designs and our production methods.
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Now I've outlined for you a horrifying and really alarming range of
challenges. How do we deal with this far-flung and aggressively pursued
range of threats? We have lost a lot of time. Fortunately, if we understand
and speak clearly to our own purposes and the nature of the threat I have
outlined, we can enlist the help of friends and sympathizers across the
world, as well as the support of the American people which is critical.
.Ir President Reagan has taken four critical first steps. He has made an
unambiguous commitment to strengthening our overall military strength, to
working for mutual reductions in nuclear arms and weapons of mass destruction,
to enhancing our ability and activity in speaking openly to the world and the
people of the world, and to rebuilding our intelligence capabilities.
Let me give you a brief report on the health of the American intelligence
community and its role in meeting this range of threats I have outlined for you.
Over the years, my predecessors as Director of Central Intelligence have
created a great apparatus of scholarship and technology to collect and analyze
a vast flow of information gathered from all over the world. Marvels of
electronics, cartography, acoustics and other techniques permit us to share
with the American public, as we saw during the SALT debate of a couple of years
back, detailed information about weapons on the other side of the world which
the Soviets hold secret. We continue to press the frontiers of science to
improve our ability to monitor both the potentially hostile deployment of
these weapons and the mutual reduction of nuclear weapons which we hope to
negotiate.
My highest responsibility as Director of Central Intelligence is to produce
sound national intelligence estimates on issues relevant to our national security.
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We've taken steps to assure standards of integrity and objectivity, relevance
and timeliness, accuracy and independence in these intelligence assessments.
The chiefs of all our intelligence components (the National Security
Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department's Intelligence
and Research component, the intelligence services of the armed forces--Army,
Navy, Air Force, Marines--Treasury, FBI, and Energy) now meet as a board of
estimates to assure that all available information and all the different,
substantiated views are fully reflected to provide our decisionmakers with
a range of real and specific expectations as to what may be ahead.
We've established a Center for the Study of Insurgency and Instability
to provide advance warning of potentials for destabilization around the world,
this to protect against the kind of surprise we experienced with the fall of
the Shah in Iran. The small and weak countries in which an insurgency could
be developed to overthrow governments do not need and cannot handle expensive
and sophisticated weapons which they all seek. What they need is light arms
to defend themselves against externally trained and supported guerrillas, good
intelligence, good police methods, good communications, training in small arms
and their use in small unit actions, and the mobility to keep up with the
hit-and-run tactics used by insurgents and guerrillas around the world. We
can introduce an element of stability into the Third World by helping small
countries develop those skills and capabilities, and we can do this for a
fraction of our foreign aid budget. After all, governments facing civil war
cannot achieve the economic and social objectives of our foreign aid until
they're able to control and combat internal disruption. Social progress does
not come in the middle of civil war.
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El Salvador just a few months ago provided an example of how we can help
these beleaguered nations defend themselves. . The success of the recent elections
in that beleaguered country came only with US aid to El Salvadoran troops and
officers, and from providing intelligence which helped the El Salvadoran Army
break up guerrilla formations before they could carry out the brutal attacks
they planned in order to keep the people from voting. On the evening of the
election there, you will recall the American public saw on their television
screens what the guerrillas planned for the whole country. In Usulutan, the
provincial capital nearest Nicaragua, we saw on those television screens the
streets empty, the people huddled behind closed doors as guerrillas fired
their rifles at those doors. No one voted in that little town. Happily, on
the television screens we saw in the rest of the country long lines of people
patiently waiting in the hot sun to cast their vote. This contrast in two
minutes wiped out at least the disinformation about what has been happening in
Central America.
To counter the terrorists, with operational headquarters in Beirut,
Tripoli in Libya, Aden in South Yemen, and other centers across international
borders and into five continents, we work with the intelligence services of
friendly nations. Together we are developing a network to track terrorist
organizations and activities and train local quick reaction forces to carry
the fight against terrorism around the world.
To combat the loss of critical technology to our adversaries, we've
established a Technology Transfer Center to provide ammunition to other
government agencies plus ways to sensitize our scientists, our engineers
and sales forces in the case of technology pickpockets, the dummy customers
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and the forged papers used to funnel sensitive technology and equipment
behind the Iron Curtain. We helped develop and enforce restrictions limiting
the flow of sensitive technology in trade and other normal business transactions.
To combat false propaganda, our intelligence can identify the forgeries
and distortions. But to expose and rebut them, the private sector of the free
world will have to tackle much of the load. This is a challenge for everyone
who believes in the value of a free, open society. And nobody meets this
challenge more effectively and more vigorously than the American Legion in its
publications and its organized activity around this country. So I urge upon
you and other organizations, we need a great deal more of this activity.
In the final analysis, all these threats boil down to a struggle for the
hearts and minds of men. The courage of the Afghan freedom fighters, supported
by arms and training provided by many other nations, escalates the price and
deters armed aggression and insurrection everywhere. The world has seen the
Communist system fail in Poland. There the once-proud call of Lenin, "Workers
of the world unite," makes those in Warsaw and the Kremlin tremble.
One concluding thought. As a nation, we have a propensity for shooting
ourselves in the foot. One of these self-inflicted wounds close to my heart
leaves the United States the only country in the world which gives foreign
intelligence agencies, and anyone else, a legal license to poke into our files.
I question very seriously whether a secret intelligence agency and a Freedom
of Information Act can co-exist for very long. The willingness of foreign
intelligence agencies and their services to share their information and to rely
on us fully, and of individuals to risk their lives and reputations to help us,
will continue to dwindle unless we get rid of the Freedom of Information Act.
[Applause.]
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Secrecy is essential to any intelligence organization. Ironically,
secrecy is accepted without protest in many areas of our society. Physicians,
lawyers, clergymen, grand juries, journalists, income tax returns, crop futures--
all have confidential aspects protected by law. Why should national security
information be entitled to any less protection?
[Applause.]
I'm not asking for any retreat from our commitment to protect essential
liberties, but only to bear in mind, as Justice Goldberg once said, that "while
the Constitution protects against invasions of individual rights, it is not
a suicide pact."
In conclusion, I would only echo the sentiments so eloquently expressed by
your National Commander that we have nothing to fear in any of these challenges
if we deal with them directly, with calm and with faith.
Thank you.
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