REMARKS OF WILLIAM J. CASEY DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE BEFORE ASSOCIATION OF FORMER INTELLIGENCE OFFICERS TENTH ANNUAL CONVENTION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP86M00886R002100060004-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 13
• Document Creation Date: December 21, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 19, 2008
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: October 20, 1984
• Content Type: MISC

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DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
before
ASSOCIATION OF FORMER INTELLIGENCE OFFICERS
TENTH ANNUAL CONVENTION
Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza Hotel
Rockville, Maryland
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Despite the turbulence and winds of the political season, I am pleased
to be with you this evening. The winds may be at their peak this weekend or
get windier over the next two weeks. In any event, I appreciate this opportunity
to visit with old friends and to thank each of you for the encouragement,
understanding and support we get from AFIO. You have implemented the theme
of your tenth annual conference, "Eyes and Ears of the Free World," in so
many ways with your interest and constant encouragement and your support of
our recruiting and our legislative needs. AFIO has managed to take the
sting out of some news stories when we felt helplessly maligned.
In the wake of the bombing of our Embassy in Beirut and the crashing
of a reconnaissance plane in Salvador, we are reminded all too keenly that
intelligence officers risk and give their lives to preserve freedom and
protect our national security.
Tonight I would like to talk to you about how intelligence has changed,
the new challenges we face, and the progress we have made in rebuilding our
capabilities in the last couple of years.
When I was appointed DCI, President Reagan defined specific things he
wanted to see accomplished. They were: reestablishing the President's Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board, legislation on criminal sanctions against disclosing
the Identities of US intelligence officers, relief from the Freedom of Information
Act, undertaking an urgent effort to rebuild the intelligence agencies and
to improve capabilities for technical and clandestine collection, cogent
analysis, counterintelligence, and capabilities to influence international
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events vital to our national security interests. This is an appropriate
time to review this because this last week the President signed legislation
exempting CIA's operational files from Freedom of Information Act requests.
With this, we can feel comfortable that all of these objectives have been
either attained or well under way. The President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board is functioning effectively, Identities legislation has been
enacted into law, with the approval of the FY-85 budget we have in hand the
resources needed to complete over 80 percent of the five-year program to
rebuild from the 40 percent reduction in funding and 50 percent slash in
personnel which the Intelligence Community suffered during the 70s, with the
balance to be requested in the budget which will go to the Congress next
January. This could not have been accomplished without the support AFIO has
given to every aspect of this program.
Where are we today? There appears to be a conviction among our people
that the Intelligence Community has never been in better shape. That opinion
is widely shared throughout the components which make up our Intelligence
Community. We have rebounded from the cuts of the 70s. We have a growing
and dedicated work force. A new headquarters building completed for the
Defense Intelligence Agency and under construction at the CIA. A bigger
budget. Improved morale. We are fit, healthy, and have rededicated ourselves
to excellence.
Many of you, as myself, were there at the birth of our national intelligence
service. If you were to return today, many things would be familiar. Commitment
and dedication, willingness to challenge-the conventional wisdom, the basic
principles of sound analysis and effective collection, the can-do spirit.
Much would also be new.
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One dramatic difference is in the number of targets. The Soviet Union
is still our primary focus, but other targets have become important. Today,
many of this country's enemies operate mostly underground, dealing with
drugs, terror and blueprints as well as weapons and subversion across
international borders and wherever instability and revolution can be generated.
The Soviets continue to expand a large arsenal of nuclear weapons aimed
at the United States, Western Europe, and East Asia. New missiles and
missile-carrying aircraft and submarines are being designed, developed,
tested, and deployed in amazing profusion. This is augmented by work carried
on over the last decade to improve their missile defenses.
In Europe, the Warsaw Pact conventional forces outnumber NATO in troop
strength, tanks, guns and planes. Smart bombs, anti-tank and anti-aircraft
missiles along with other sophisticated conventional weapons are being deployed
in an increasingly aggressive way. A growing number of long-range missiles
are aimed at capital cities and military targets in Western Europe.
But the main threat from the Soviets may lie elsewhere. As early as
1962, Khrushchev told us that Communism would win--not through nuclear war
which could destroy the world, or even conventional war which could lead to
nuclear war--but rather through wars of national liberation in Africa, Asia,
and Latin America. Today, after 20 years of promoting and supporting such
wars, the Soviets and their proxies have bases in Afghanistan, Angola, Vietnam,
Ethiopia, Cuba and Nicaragua, from which further attacks are being made
today into Pakistan, El Salvador, Sudan, Kampuchea, and where next?
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But for the last few years there has been a difference. Whereas in the
1960s and 1970s anti-Western causes attracted recruits throughout the Third
World, the 1980s have emerged as the decade of guerrillas resisting Communist
regimes. Today in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua,
to mention only the most prominent arenas, thousands of ordinary people are
volunteers in irregular wars against the Soviet Army or Soviet-supported
regimes. More than a quarter of a million people have taken up arms against
Communist oppression in these countries.
Moscow views the Third World as our Achilles Heel and the increasing
economic and social strains in underdeveloped countries will afford them
many opportunities in the future.
To implement its overall strategy, the Soviets use the worldwide apparatus
of the KGB, plus some 70 non-governing Communist parties, plus peace and
friendship organizations all over the world directed from Moscow, plus the
East German, Cuban and other Bloc intelligence services--all working to
steal our technology, to damage our reputation, to divide us from our friends,
to destabilize, subvert and overthrow governments friendly to us. Rumors,
agents of influence, kept press and radio facilities and forgeries spreading
poison around the world need to be spotted and countered.
CIA is the organization in the Free World most capable of dealing effectively
with this enormous apparatus and frustrating its objectives. Terrorism is a
new weapons system which works to dissolve the boundary between war and
peace. We've seen it move from plastic charges, to assassinations, to
highjacking, to car bombs and we worry about nuclear and biological terrorism.
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Major terrorist organizations and a great many more "mom and pop shops"
can be hired by aggressive and radical governments to serve as instruments
of foreign policy. US facilities and people are a major target. Last year
there were more than 550 serious terrorist attacks worldwide and all of us
feel all too keenly the three disasters we suffered in Beirut. Terrorists
operate in small groups on a need to know basis. Yet we have developed a
worldwide counterterrorism network through intelligence exchanges, technical
support, training and close relationships with intelligence and security
services around the world. Terrorist attacks have been thwarted and rescue
operations have been carried out in many parts of the world.
Narcotics is another problem that is engaging more and more of our
attention. There is a steady flow of drugs into the United States from
South America, the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia, from Afghanistan,
Pakistan, and Iran. The methods by which drug smugglers bring narcotics
into this country defy the imagination. Some of the huge amounts of money
being made in drugs are used to finance terrorists and revolutionary political
groups around the world.
Additional resources are being committed to collecting information
about narcotics and more people are analyzing that information. Coordination
between intelligence and law enforcement agencies is improving steadily.
Another challenging intelligence question we face is determining the
state of Soviet technology and science and the potential for military and
strategic technological surprise.
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In some technology areas, Soviet capability rivals our own, although
the periodic estimates we produce show that the U.S. remains in the lead in
most critical categories. However, we cannot afford to be complacent.
Soviets are making remarkable progress and much of it with our help.
During the late 1970s, the Soviets got about 30,000 samples of Western
production equipment, weapons, and military components and over 400,000
technical documents, both classified and unclassified. In 1981, we organized
the Technology Transfer Assessment Center which determined that the increased
power, accuracy, precision and sophistication of Soviet weapons had come
from the acquisition and use of our technology to a much greater extent than
we ever dreamed.
How do the Soviets get so much of our technical know-how? Three ways--
they comb through our open literature, buy through legal channels, attend
our scientific and technical conferences, and send their students here to
study. They use dummy firms in sophisticated international diversion
operations, some legal, some illegal, to purchase Western technology. We
know of some 300 firms operating from more than 30 countries worldwide engaged
in these trade diversion schemes. Finally, technology acquisition has become
probably the highest priority of the KGB and GRU. For some 15 years they
have brought about 100 young engineers and technicians a year to develop a
specialized unit of perhaps 1,000 people devoted to espionage and theft of
Western technology. During 1982, this threat was extensively briefed to our
liaison services and over the year and a half well over 150 Soviet agents,
most of them engaged in technology theft, have been arrested or expelled or
have defected in well over 20 countries around the world. Successes have
been achieved in recovering stolen technology, blocking shipments and breaking
up technology smuggling rings.
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In addition to these changing and increasingly complex targets, enhanced
technical and human intelligence collection capabilities will intensify the
challenge of processing and analyzing the vast amounts of information coming
in every day. We will cope with this by using supercomputers and, further
in the future, with artificial intelligence. Plans are under way to improve
and expand the Community's computer databases so that analysts in different
agencies can better share ideas. Hundreds of analysts now have terminals
right at their desks to read, compose and edit. And NSA struggles valiantly
with the demanding security aspects of these new communications systems.
A great deal was heard about the purging of the clandestine apparatus
in the late 1970s. Less well known is the massive departure of professionals
from the analytic side of CIA during the same period. Nearly half of our
analysts left between 1977 and 1981. The strength of our analytical corps
has been restored and the quality of its work improved. From a low point in
1980 of only 12 national estimates, we now publish some 50 national estimates
a year as well as 25 other Intelligence Community assessments. In addition,
we complete about 1,000 major research projects on a nearly inconceivable
range of subjects from Soviet weapons systems to political instability, the
now worldwide reach of the Soviet Union, heroin production and distribution,
black market arms trade, population and debt problems, and so on. This is
in addition to our regular stream of periodicals--dailies, weeklies, monthlies
and quarterlies.
Another dramatic difference, certainly from the early days of intelligence,
is closer public scrutiny. Congress is more involved in our activities through
the Congressional oversight process and the press covers us more assiduously.
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In our relationship with the press some tension is inherent. Journalists
are committed to finding'out the most they can about us. We are committed
to protecting legitimate secrets. But while intelligence should not be
divorced from public opinion, neither should it be overly concerned with the
daily shifts, the ups and downs, of public criticism or praise.
For decades CIA has generally not responded to criticism publicly and
certainly not in detail. Public understanding and support is so vital today
that we can no longer always suffer in silence. Sometimes the record needs
to be put straight. We do sometimes succeed in getting false stories retracted,
distorted stories corrected.
CIA's relationship with the press has gone through several swings of
the pendulum--from freer, though cautious, access to "batten down the hatches."
We have found that the best approach is to maintain a dialogue when possible,
always making clear that our first priority is to protect classified sources
and methods. Journalists realize that while our press people may not be able
to tell them much, what they do tell them is the truth. Most journalists
are responsible and most do try to be right.
But even one inaccurate story that we are helpless to rebut can cause a
lot of damage to sources and methods, to US credibility, and to our crucial
negotiations. They can provide propaganda fodder for our adverseries and
save the KGB time and money.
We put a lot of effort into giving the Congress the information it
needs for it to discharge its oversight and legislative obligations with a
substantial legislative liaison staff and close to a thousand briefings a
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year by intelligence analysts. It is vital to maintain public and policymaker
confidence in not only the quality but the integrity of our assessments.
For that we depend on the integrity of our analysts in a process which assures
that all substantiated points of view are heard, considered and reflected.
Nearly all of our assessments go to the two Congressional oversight committees
whose members or staffs are in a position to detect any bias. All estimates
are reviewed by the chiefs of all of the components of the Intelligence
Community sitting at a board of estimates who are encouraged to stake out
dissenting views. In a recent estimate claimed in the media to have been
slanted, about half of this board held one view, the other half another, and
each view was spelled out on the first page of the estimate. To gather
alternative views, resources for outside expertise to help and critique our
analysis have almost tripled and we have conducted a massive campaign to put
our analysts in touch with experts in the private sector, universities,
think tanks, private business here and abroad.
Our assessments are not produced in an ivory tower atmosphere. The
debates and clash of ideas sometimes are rough; no one's views--from the
Director to the newest analyst--are protected from challenge and criticism.
It is not a place for delicate egos or mediocrity or people with special
agendas. But out of that process comes, despite its imperfections, the
best, most comprehensive and most objective intelligence reporting in the
world. And our critics help keep it that way.
Keeping this up depends on attracting the best young people in America.
That intelligence rides high with the American public is evident. Last year
over 150,000 people sought to join the CIA. We are hiring only about one
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out of every 100 who want to tackle the challenge of our work and far less
than that for operations and analytical work. Our recruitment work is exacting
and exhaustive but our standards remain high and will not be lowered. A
number of the future leaders in our organization have been spotted and recruited
by the alumni in this audience. I ask each of you to exploit any avenue
which may be open to you to help find the superior quality people we need,
and to encourage them to consider intelligence careers. Here you can and
have helped us enormously.
These years as Director of Central Intelligence have been a rich and
gratifying experience for me. I am honored to serve with the dedicated
officers who are carrying on a fine tradition of quality, hard work, and
commitment that many of you here started. Today as a nation we are facing
up to some hard realities--realities that a democratic society often finds
it difficult to acknowledge. We have rebuilt our defenses as well as our
intelligence service. These twin pillars, if backed by a national will to
remain prepared, will ensure the peace and preserve our freedoms.
Thank you for your continuing support.
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MEMORANDUM FOR: Director of Central Intelligence
FROM: George V. Lauder
Director, Public Affairs Office
SUBJECT: Address to the AFIO Tenth Annual Convention
1. Action Requested: None. This is background information for your
address tthe AFIO Convention, Saturday, 20 October, 7:00 - 10:00 p.m., at
the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza Hotel in Rockville. The telephone number is
[phone].
? Arrangements: You and Mrs. Casey are requested to be at the
main entrance of the Hotel at 7:00 p.m. where you will be met
by the Executive Director of AFIO, John Greaney. He will
escort you to the reception in the Regency room. A receiving
line is not planned. The banquet is at 8:00 p.m. in the Plaza
Ballroom and your speech is scheduled to begin at 9:00 p.m. -
You have been asked to speak for 20-25 minutes and to allow ZO
minutes for questions and answers. President of AFIO (and
former Deputy Director of DIA) Major General Richard X. Larkin
USA (Ret.) will introduce you. (See attached biography.) A
podium with a microphone will be placed by the side of the
head table which will be on an elevated platform. (See
opposite for head table list.) "A business suit is the dress
for the evening. Your remarks will be taped for our records.
Congressman Henry J. Hyde (R,IL) is scheduled to address the
group at noon and will discuss his bill for a Joint
Intelligence Committee. NIO David Whipple will participate in
the Saturday morning panel on the "Role of Intelligence in
Fighting Terrorism." The previous day the Assistant Secretary
of the Air Force, Tidal McCoy, will address the group on U.S.
preparedness. Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy
General Richard Stilwell, PFIAB member Admiral Thomas Morrer,
and General James Abrahamson, Head of the President's
Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (Star Wars), will
appear on a panel to discuss "A Look at the Intelligence of
the Future." Opposite is a complete-convention agenda and
brochure showing the layout of the hotel. After the banquet,
if you wish to attend, you are invited to visit one of their
hospitality rooms #719 or #819.
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Periscope.)
Geo V. Lauder
SUBJECT: Address to the AFIO Tenth Annual Convention
? Speech: Your proposed remarks are attached. If you have
urt ins and wish a final, cleaned-up copy, please
call We have included new sections on terrorism,
the press, and leaks, as you requested. The speech takes a
community perspective, mentioning new developments in other
agencies as well as CIA.
? Audience: Approximately 400 former intelligence officers both
civilian and military will be present. AFIO Honorary Board
members, the Honorable Clare Boothe Luce, and Mr. John Barron,
author of "KGB Today" and senior editor of the Readers Digest,
may also attend.
As far as we have been informed by Mr. Greaney, Ross Munro of
Time Magazine and a representative from the Armed Forces
Journal w~ be present. Ross Munro current Ty covers
intelligence issues for Time.
? The Convention's Theme and More on AFIO: The Tenth Annual
Convention theme is the yes and Ears of the Free World" as
President Reagan referred to Intelligence at the 24 May CIA
ground-breaking ceremony. This group of former intelligence
professionals was formed in 1975 to defend the active
Intelligence Community. Today AFIO, with a membership of,
3500, is dedicated to the development of a national
understanding of the need for an effective intelligence
capability. (See attachment opposite of AFIO's publication
Attachment
STAT
STAT
DCI/PAO 15 Oct 84
(Distribution:
Orig. - Addressee
1 - PAO 84-0386
1 -ER
1 -
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