GELB/TURNER: INTELLIOGENCE ACTIVITIES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000301680002-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 10
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 14, 2010
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: April 21, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS STAFF
PROGRAM Great Decisions '85
DATE April 21, 1985 1:00 P.M.
STATION WETA-TV
PBS Network
SUBJECT Gelb/Turner: Intelligence Activities
Washington, D.C.
ANNOUNCER: Great Decisions '85, the nonpartisan series
which brings together over a quarter million Americans for the
discussion of major foreign policy issues, produced in coopera-
tion with the Foreign Policy Association and the University of
South Carolina. This program was recorded at the Woodrow Wilson
House in the Embassy Row section of Washington, D.C.
EDWIN NEWMAN: Hello. I'm Edwin Newman for Great
Decisions '85, in which we join a quarter of a million Americans
who take part in this discussion program on foreign policy.
Today we take up America's intelligence activities, and
in particular undercover operations. Does our country need
covert operations, including, at times, the overthrowing of other
governments? If it does, how do we reconcile the need for
secrecy with the right of the people and the Congress to know and
indeed control what is being done?
To discuss these questions we have with us Admiral
Stansfield Turner, United States Navy, Retired, former Director
of Central Intelligence; and Leslie Gelb, national security
correspondent for the New York Times, formerly Director of the
State Department's Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs.
Admiral Turner, does the country need covert actions,
covert operations?
ADMIRAL STANSFIELD TURNER: Yes, it does, Ed. But let's
define the situation first. The primary role of the Central
Intelligence Agency is to conduct intelligence activities:
collecting information abroad, analyzing, interpreting it, and
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giving it to our policymakers.
Covert action, as it's defined in a law of the Congress,
is not intelligence work, it's trying to influence the course of
events in another country without the source of that influence
being acknowledged. In short, it's an action activity of foreign
policy, not an intelligence activity of collecting information on
which to base a foreign policy.
NEWMAN: Will it necessarily be military, paramilitary?
ADMIRAL TURNER: No, there are three different types of
covert action. The first is propaganda, putting out information
that we want other people to have, but we don't want them to know
we're the source of it. Political support, maybe providing money
or other advice to politicians in other countries whose opposi-
tion is being supported by the Communists. And finally, para-
military action, providing arms and military advice to groups
that are using arms to conduct political activity.
Now, either political support or paramilitary action can
attempt to topple a government of some country. And that's where
it gets highly controversial.
NEWMAN: Do we need covert operations, Mr. Gelb?
LESLIE GELB: I do not think that the United States
should deny itself this instrument, the covert instrument. I
think the real question is and should be, every time we face this
question, (A) what is the policy that informs and creates the
need for covert action? Does the policy make sense? And
secondly, do we really benefit from doing it covertly, and can it
work that way?
Usually, the debate focuses simply on the fact that the
act is intended to be secret, or at least to be unacknowledged,
not on whether the policy makes any sense, or whether the
instrumentality, in this case, although delicate, complicated,
sometimes not secret, makes sense.
ADMIRAL TURNER: I'd like to emphasize a point that Les
made here. The Church Committee of the Senate of the United
States, that studied intelligence very intensively in 1975-76,
came to the conclusion that covert actions had not been very
successful when they weren't in support of a policy -- the point
you made at the beginning. You've got to have government
policies. Covert action can't be the policy.
The reason we're in trouble in Nicaragua today with the
Contras' covert action is that it's the only policy we have for
that country. We don't have an agreed national approach to
dealing with Nicaragua.
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NEWMAN: Do you mean covert operations are sometimes
dreamed up and carried out without regard to the national policy
of the United States?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, not quite that bad. In 1974 the
Congress passed a law called the Hughes-Ryan Amendment. I
stipulated that anytime the CIA does a covert action, it must get
the approval, expressly, of the President of the United States,
and it must then inform the two intelligence committees of the
Congress. So it is not something that's done totally by the CIA
on its own, separate from policy.
But what I am saying is in Nicaragua today there isn't
really a national consensus on what our policy for Nicaragua
should be. And so doing a covert action down there is not a wise
move, because it isn't trying to support some basic policy; it is
the policy. And it won't work.
GELB: Let me just follow up on that, if I may.
My sense is that the so-called covert action against the
government of Nicaragua was really pushed by the policymakers in
the Reagan Administration, and not by the Central Intelligence
Agency.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Oh, yes. Because they had no other
policy, and they found this was a way to try to do it.
GELB: Put pressure on the Sandinistas. How do you do
it? Well, you can squeeze them economically. But that's not
enough. They're helping the guerrillas in Salvador, so let's
have a guerrilla action against them in Nicaragua.
But taht does not a policy make. Sometimes it com-
plicates your ability to formulate a policy later on.
NEWMAN: I had a sense a minute ago, Mr. Gelb, that you
were going to suggest that, almost by definition, covert oper-
ations don't achieve what it is hoped they will. Was I wrong?
GELB: Yeah, you are wrong. I think that there are a
number of occasions, many occasions, particularly when you take
stands in three categories, where covert operations have done
what they're supposed to do. They've been effective, and I think
they've been consistent with our democratic system.
NEWMAN: Which ones have succeeded, that you feel able
to identify?
GELB: Well, one can take, I think, a whole series of
covert actions that were done in Europe at the end of World War
II to try to buttress democratic forces in Western Europe. And I
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think those were almost without exception successful.
NEWMAN: But that was, of course, a different world, in
which there was a clear line being drawn in Italy, for example,
as Admiral Turner said, where we supported the Christian Demo-
crats led by De Gasperi, with the express intention of seeing to
it that the Italian Communists did not come to power. The same
thing, for that matter, in France.
The issue, in a way, was simpler then, was it not? is
that why there seems to be less confidence in our leaders in
their judgment on these matters?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, you're absolutely right. You
see, we did have a firm policy in Italy and France. We wanted
the democatic forces to survive, and Communism not to take
control. And so there was full national support for those covert
activities.
When it came out in 1974 that we had been meddling in
Chile, trying to do basically the same thing, keep a Communist
from coming to power by electoral means, the attitude of the
country had changed and the public was not willing to support
that kind of a covert action. It didn't happen to succeed,
anyway. But one of the reasons, I believe, it didn't is that it
wasn't something we were in national agreement about.
GELB: And again the policy, I think, is the key factor
here. Let me give you two other examples where I think the
covert action made sense and worked.
One was in 1974-75 in Portugal. There, that government
was teetering on whether it was going to go Communist or stay
pro-Western. And our government carried on a number of covert
actions that I think kept that country democratic and free. It
worked.
The second example is -- and this is a very difficult
one -- is the covert aid being given to the Afghan rebels to
fight against Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Now, this commands
substantial support in the U.S. Congress. In fact, Congress has
increased the amount of aid over and above what the Admini-
stration asked for to these rebels.
Does it make sense for us to support a group like that
against a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? I would say most
Americans think it does.
NEWMAN: Admiral Turner, you mentioned Chile. But there
was a disagreement, was there not, about whether the United
States had any business overthrowing Allende, who had been
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elected in what was thought to be a reasonably fair and open
election?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Yes. And because there was that
national disagreement, the CIA was resoundingly criticized for
doing that.
The whole Chile operation, though, raises a very
fundamental issue, and that is whether Presidents ought to be
able to do covert actions in lieu of an open policy move in some
part of the world.
That's why, under the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, we've
brought the Congress into this act, and it isn't strictly a
presidential thing anymore, as it was before 1974. So the
President must inform the Congress. They don't have to approve
what he's doing, but then they can take various actions, like
passing laws or failing to appropriate money, to cut off a covert
action if the President is not in tune with the people and the
Congress.
NEWMAN: Well, to go back to what Les Gelb was talking
about before, if each policy is judged on its own merits, or each
action is judged on its own merits, the overthrow of the Allende
government in Chile has left Chile with, so it seems, a parti-
cularly grim dictatorship for years. The same thing happened
when we overthrew the government in Guatemala.
So, a certain amount of the criticism has been directed
not merely at the fact that these operations were undertaken, but
that they didn't bring about desirable results for the people of
those countries.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, I think one of the ways in which
you measure whether you should undertake a covert action,
particularly one to overthrow a government, is do you have a
reasonable prospect of success? And in overthrowing a govern-
ment, success has got to be defined in terms of will the next
government likely be better than the past.
I think that's one criterion. And Les has been emphasi-
zing that, I believe, in what you've been saying. Is it going to
work? Is it going to do something that the country wants?
A second criterion I would emphasize is, is it really
important? The law, the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, says any covert
action must be, quote, important to the national security,
unquote. Why? Because you don't want our democratic government
doing more than absolutely necessary in a covert mode. The
essence of our democracy is control of the government by the
people. They cannot control what's done that they don't know
about.
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So, we want to minimize covert action to quite important
activities, to activities where it's going to be successful, to
activities where you can keep it secretly. And finally, as we've
been emphasizing, to activities where you have a definite policy
that it's in support of.
GELB: There is also a question, and I think a serious
one, in whether or not you can put covert actions to the same
rough tests of public judgment that you do general policy. You
know, if it's secret it's not going to be subjected to the kind
of pounding and scrutiny that public policies are. At best,
there'll be a small handful of people in the Administration
looking at it, another small group in the Congress; and they can
often make mistakes and not ask questions, probe as deeply as
something that does get into the general public domain.
And I think it means, and it has meant historically,
that we often do a lot of foolish things covertly and often make
a lot of mistakes.
NEWMAN: Well, how many people in the Congress actually
get to know about covert action?
ADMIRAL TURNER: In 1980 we got the Congress to pass a
law that said two committees of the Congress, the two Intel-
ligence Committees. I believe the Appropriations Committees have
insisted that they know about them also, and they have the power
of the purse, and so I believe they're still informed.
So, it's four committees. That would be roughly 60 or
so congressmen, let alone staff people. Now, they aren't all
actually informed in each case. The CIA goes to those committees
and says, "We are undertaking the following covert action. Do
you want to be briefed on it?" And some of them do and some of
them don't. So I would guess, on the average, it's much less
than 60 members of Congress really get into the details of one of
these activities.
NEWMAN: Is that a workable system, Admiral?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Yes. I think it is workable.
NEWMAN: It protects the public interest?
ADMIRAL TURNER: I think it does very well. In the
Carter Administration we did not have any leaks of covert
actions.
But when you do something as big, as controversial, as
not acceptable to the people as was the mining of the harbors of
Nicaragua, and I think the entire covert Contra operation, then
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it's going to leak and it's going to come out through one of
these oversight processes, either being reviewed in the Executive
Branch on its way to the President, or being reviewed by the
Congress after the President signs it.
NEWMAN: As a practical matter, if a member of one of
the committees being informed objected to the covert action being
proposed, thought it was a bad idea, what could he or she do?
ADMIRAL TURNER: First, he or she can go to the Director
of Central Intelligence, have a meeting, exchange a letter,
whatever, to try to persuade first the Director of Central
Intelligence, secondly the President, himself, that this is a bad
idea. More importantly, he would try to get the entire committee
behind him and have the committee take such a position with the
President. Next, he can try to pass secret legislation that will
actually order the President to change the covert action or cease
doing it. And finally, and this did happen in 1982, they can
pass public legislation. Now, that really discloses that there
is at least some covert action going on. We did pass -- the
Congress did, rather, in 1982 what's kown as the Boland Amend-
ment. And that amendment limited what the Congress wanted the
Executive to do in Nicaragua.
NEWMAN: So the members of the committee do have the
power to blow the whistle, so to speak.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Yes. But I think the lesson we have
learned from how they tried to control the Contra operation in
Nicaragua is that they've got to be pretty past off the mark.
They were a little slow on that one, don't you think,
Les, and it'd gotten off a big momentum, and there's been a
struggle with the Congress and the Executive that was unnecessary
if the Congress had been more firm earlier on?
NEWMAN: Then a particularly heavy burden, then, rests
on the members of the committees that are informed or to which
the offer of being formed...
ADMIRAL TURNER: Yes. And it's different for the
Congress than most things. In most cases, the Congress has got
to give approval. I mean, after all, you can't get money in our
government unless the Congress approves it.
In this instance, we don't want the Congress to approve
each covert action, in my opinion. We want them to be informed
of it, and then take the initiative to stop it if they don't want
it. Why? Because sometimes you want to move with a covert
action very quickly.
Once or twice -- and it did happen once while I was
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Director -- you want to do a covert action without informing the
Congress ahead of time. There's just too much risk to human life
if anybody who doesn't absolutely need to know knows it. The law
provides that you must then explain to the Congress after the
fact why you delayed informing them. I think that's an adequate
safety valve.
NEWMAN: Les, you've been on both sides of this. How
far should newspeople go in seeking out information about such
actions and making it public?
GELB: I don't have a good answer to that at all, Ed.
If a story comes my way about a covert action, I will generally
write about it, but within limits. I'll talk about how much
money has been appropriated for the Afghan operation, the kinds
of arms involved, that it's being fed through the Pakistani
government. But I won't go into further detail about the
operation because I think that that really could jeopardize
people's lives. And what I've written about is plenty sufficient
to get a public debate going about the policy that's informing
the covert action.
So I guess I do generally write about it, but I draw the
line at anything that would risk lives.
NEWMAN: We've recently had an instance in which
information about a military satellite launched from the space
shuttle was made public by some news organizations. Did it serve
the public interest that that information got out?
GELB: But that was such nonsense, that issue, Ed. It
really was. Because what the newspapers and magazines published
was something that was generally known. And the Russians know
far more than that. And it got even sillier when the Administra-
tion decided not to announce the time of the launching, as if the
Russians didn't know that to the mini-second, or the time of the
release of this satellite up in the sky, as if the Russians
wouldn't watch every move of that. It really got nonsensical.
Let me just add a point to that. If we're talking about
the exact capabilities of that satellite, what it can tell
American leaders about exactly what the Soviet Union is doing,
then I think that's fair for the government to be able to keep
that secret. There's no reason the public has to know that.
We're not going to be a more democratic, informed people by
virtue of that knowledge. And if we did give that information to
the Soviet Union, they could deny our obtaining the information
that we could otherwise get.
NEWMAN: Let's take another recent example, the manual
of operations that was prepared by some CIA people for the
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Contras in Nicaragua, which included the well-known phrase about
neutralizing various Nicaraguan leaders and officials.
Was there a lack of supervision from the top of the CIA
in that matter?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, clearly, the word has not got
down to the lower levels, in this case, apparently, people who
were brought in especially for this activity, not full-time CIA
people, that the President, starting in 1976 with Mr. Ford,
continuing through both Mr. Carter and Mr. Reagan, has outlawed
assassination or any form of political murder. That manual
apparently did condone that.
So, yes, there was a lack of thoroughness in having the
agency people understand the rules under which they're operating.
NEWMAN: Maybe there's no answer to this question, but
how could that be?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, that takes a lot of philosophy,
Ed. I get in trouble for saying this sometimes, but I'll say it
again. A lot of CIA people, who were very fine intelligence
people, were raised in that agency for 30 years with no over-
sight, no accountability, no real external controls. I found
that some of them could not adjust to the changes that had to be
made after the Church Committee investigations of 1975. The
country, the Congress demanded that we put some kind of checks
and balances on the CIA.
People who have not operated under any control for 30
years, in some instances, found it difficult to adjust to that.
I think they probably brought some of those back for Nicaragua,
and they still hadn't really understood.
And let me make a final point on that, and that is that
controls over intelligence in our democratic society are essent-
ial, not just to protect the people, but to protect intelligence.
As a result of not having any accountability over 30 years, the
CIA did make some mistakes.
You, Les, I, all of us would be a little less careful
about decisions we make if we know we're not going to be held
accountable. They weren't bad people in the CIA in those days.
They were people who got carried away with enthusiasm to support
the country, to do what they thought was needed. But they did
some things that were in excess.
In our democratic society, when those eventally, as they
almost always will, came to the surface, almost all human
intelligence activity in the CIA came to a grinding halt, partly
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because the Congress said stop, partly because the CIA pro-
fessionals were very conscientious and they didn't want to do
anything more that could cause more damage, more complaints about
their activities. So they sort of slowed down.
What I'm saying is after 30 years of no accountability,
our intelligence had ground itself to a halt. We need that
oversight, that accountability to the White House, that account-
ability to the Congress in order to insure that we don't run into
that problem again.
NEWMAN: If you have a section of an agency that is set
up to carry out covert operations, will, in effect, the people in
it not be sitting around dreaming up covert operations they can
carry out?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Yes. Though the beauty of having
assigned covert action to the CIA is that if you don't have much
covert action going on, you can move those people over into doing
intelligence work. And that's what we did in the 1970s when
there was a lull in covert action.
I'd be very reluctant to see a separate agency created
to do covert action because, as you suggest, if there wasn't a
need for covert action, most people would be dreaming it up in
order to stay in business.
GELB: I've found that most of the dreaming up of
cockeyed covert operations came from policymakers more than from
the professionals in the CIA. It was a toy in the hands of a lot
of people, a way of out of making what they saw as otherwise
tough decisions. They thought it was easier to do it this way.
And I think a good many of the problems comes from that source
rather than from screwball James Bond type operators.
ADMIRAL TURNER: And unfortunately, because of James
Bond, there are even reasongly well-informed policymakers in our
government who think we can do an awful lot more with covert
action than we really can.
GELB: Uh-huh.
NEWMAN: Thank you very much, Admiral Turner.
Thank you, Mr. Gelb.
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