REMARKS OF WILLIAM J. CASEY DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE BEFORE THE SOCIETY FOR HISTORIANS OF AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS AT GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON, D.C. 25 JUNE 1986

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88G01117R001004140002-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 16
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 31, 2011
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: June 25, 1986
• Content Type: MISC

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REMARKS OF WILLIAM J. CASEY
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
BEFORE
THE SOCIETY FOR HISTORIANS OF AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS
AT
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON, D. C.
25 JUNE 1986
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I am delighted to oe here this evening with the Society for
Historians of American Foreign Relations, I'm glad that you
invited me to join your discussions. I'm glad that the
Conference on Peace Research in History and the American
Military Institute are both with us, since intelligence is a
function that is as essential for the conduct of foreign policy
in peace as it is necessary for survival in war. Our president
and foreign policy-makers need the best intelligence possible
if they are to spend a $300 billion Defense budget wisely and
if they are to shape a sound American policy to preserve the
peace, Modern arms control agreements, for example, are only
feasible because of the effective technical means of
verification that our Intelligence Community works to provide,
Research into the relationship between intelligence and
history is much easier than it use to be. As a result of
Senator Durengerger's initiative, and with the encouragement of
the Senate Intelligence Committee, CIA took steps to transfer
to the National Archives and Records Administration its entire
holdings of declassified OSS permanent records. This large and
important collection has been transferred in increments over
the past two years, and almost all of it is now open to the
public at the National Archives on Constitution Avenue, The
opening of this collection for the first time permits well
documented studies of the role of American intelligence in
World War II,
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I have built on this transfer of OSS records to establish
an Historical Review Program to review and release records of
CIA itself for historical research, In organizing this new
program we had invaluable help from consultations last year
with Robert Warner, then Archivist of the United States; John
Broderick, Assistant Librarian of Congress; and three
distinguished American diplomatic historians, John Lewis
Gaddis, Richard Leopold, and Gaddis Smith, With additional
resources from Congress we have organized a concerted effort to
declassify and transfer to the National Archives the greatest
feasible volume of historically important CIA records,
beginning with our earliest holdings. I might add that in
connection with this Historical Review Program, Ken McDonald
and the CIA History Staff are cooperating with the Department
of State Historian's plan for publishing supplements to early
postwar volumes of the Foreign Relations of the United States,
which will contain material declassified since these volumes
first appeared. I have also pledged my strong support for
President Reagan's directive last November that necessary
measures be taken to ensure the publication by 1990 of the
Foreign Relations volumes through 1960, CIA will do everything
it can -- especially in declassification review -- to help
State meet this accerlated schedule.
Now let me turn to the interplay between history and
intelligence during our lifetime, We had substantially
demolished our intelligence capabilities in the years leading
up to World War II, When a New York lawyer, Bill Donovan, was
pressed into service by President Roosevelt in 1940, the whole
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United States intelligence apparatus was down to something like
100 officers in Army and Navy units, Upon his return from a
fact-finding mission to Europe and the Middle East, Donovan
told the President that America needed an intelligence and
covert operations capability. Roosevelt didn't need much
persuasion. Six months before Pearl Harbor, Donovan was in
business as head of what would become the OSS,
In World War II we were amateurs and learned about
intelligence from the British. We also learned that when
people are deprived of civil liberties they fight, Guerrilla
movements in Yugoslavia, Greece and Albania were a major factor
in keeping some 40 German, Italian, Bulgarian, and Croatian
divisions in Southeast Europe far from the arena of decision,
Resistance armies in Norway, Denmark, Holland and Belgium tied
up other German forces and delayed their movement to reinforce
fighting in France,
After the fall of France in 1940, Great Britain found
itself alone, with most of its army's guns, armor and transport
left behind on the continent, Fearing invasion of its own
island, Britain could only wage a war of attrition against the
economy and morale of the victorious Germans, Britain had to
use the only weapons it had left -- the Royal Navy to blockade,
the Royal Air Force to bomb, and the people of Occupied Europe
to sabotage and undermine,
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To mobilize resistance in the vanquished nations, Winston
Churchill created SOE, the Special Operations Executive, and
issued his memorable order, "Set Europe ablaze." Many brave
Britons were ready to become commandos, and many brave
Europeans were eager to risk their lives to inflict damage on
the conqueror and redeem their national pride and honor.
Europeans at large cheered them on until they discovered what
the occupier would do in reprisal, like wipe out an entire
village. German reprisals turned the SOE and the resistance
groups that sprang up all over Europe largely away from
one-shot sabotage operations and hit and run raids, Rather
they began carefully and slowly to organize, train and equip
specialized groups and networks that could get intelligence,
spread propaganda, do quiet and difficult-to-detect sabotage
and develop paramilitary units capable of striking when the
time came. A long slow process, some three to four years, of
building skills, support structures, training capabilities,
organization and relationships set in.
There were three separate but loosely tied together
organizations which guided and supported this process from
outside France -- Britain's SOE, DeGaulle's Free French in
London and Algiers and, during the last two years, the OSS from
Washington, London and Algiers. Inside France separately led
and frequently rival resistance forces developed from five
principal strands. Indigenous resistance groups sprang up all
over France and consolidated into some half a dozen movements,
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more or less focused in particular regions of the country.
When the Germans attacked Russia in 1941, French Communist and
far left groups which had largely supported the occupiers went
into resistance and began to form their own units. SOE and
General DeGaulle's intelligence and action service each
separately sent organizers and radio operators all over France
to recruit resistance groups and provide them with
communications, training and weapons. Finally, when the
occupier imposed a labor draft, thousands of young men left
their homes to hide in the hills and forests, and many
ultimately formed themselves into military units that sought
arms either directly from London or through one of the earlier
resistance networks.
Before D-Day and during the allied advance from Normandy to
the Rhine, the French resistance provided invaluable
intelligence about the situation and activities of German
forces in France. In World War II this kind of intelligence,
collected by old-fashioned espionage -- human intelligence, or
humint in today's Jargon -- was enormously important. Although
getting similar information for our advancing armies from
inside Nazi Germany proved a much tougher proposition, in the
last six months of the war we managed to infiltrate some 150
American agents into the Third Reich -- and to get almost all
of them out again alive. The other two principal sources of
intelligence about the German war machine were aerial
reconnaissance and code-breaking, the forerunners of our great
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technological intelligence gathering capabilities today.
Aerial reconnaissance was of key importance both for ground
forces and air operations. Research and analysis on the German
economy laid the basis for the great strategic bombing
offensive. The breaking of German high-grade cyphers and the
operations and strategic use of these breaks -- evoked by the
single word "Ultra" -- is one of the most exciting stories of
the war. Beyond this, OSS and British counterintelligence
worked together in deception operations that badly misled the
Germans about both the time and place of the cross-channel
invasion.
When the Americans of OSS arrived on the scene in London
and Algiers early in 1943, our new and senior partners of SOE
and the Free French had been supporting resistance forces for
some three years and had become proficient and confident in
sending organizers and saboteurs into France and keeping them
there. They had performed sabotage Jobs, established
organizers and communications, built up caches of weapons,
organized resistance bands and formed them into networks. But
using these scattered and irregular forces in support of
large-scale military operations in France was a new problem.
It had to be worked out with military planners and commanders
skeptical about the value of resistance forces, We were in a
vicious circle. To satisfy ourselves about the reliability of
resistance forces, we had to persuade the arriving American
military to give them the plans and equipment they needed to
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prove their value. Yet we found that the military commanders
coming over from the US were schooled and geared to secure
their obJectives by the application of everwhelming firepower,
and they believed they had it. For the most part, they know
little and cared less about French resistance or guerrilla
warfare.
For the generals at SHAEF the French resistance movement
might be as good and important as OSS and Special Operations
Executive said it was. On the other hand, the resistance might
be an illusion and not materialize in the crunch. Sure, there
were thousands of Frenchmen eager to fight the occupier, as
many as 150,000 by some estimates. But they had to be
organized, armed and directed. Could the still nascent and
loosely knit resistance movement quickly become a cohesive
striking force that was sufficiently under our command and
control to make a military contribution to the invasion? To
answer yes required an act of faith. OSS and SOE officers in
Grosvenor Street and Baker Street who had worked with General
DeGaulle's intelligence service and with the men going in and
out of France were willing to make that commitment. Selling
the idea to our generals and their planners wasn't easy, but in
March 1944 the Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower, came down
on our side and ordered a new Special Forces Headquarters to
implement plans for resistance activities in support of the
invading armies. On 31 May SHAEF decided that instead of
signaling the resistance to rise unit by unit, as needed in the
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battle across France, there would be a general call-up of the
entire movement in support of the Normandy landings that week.
Beginning 1 June some 300 messages went out over the BBC
alerting resistance leaders all over France that the landings
would come during the week. The French resistance made 950
cuts in French rail lines on 5 June, the day before D-Day, and
destroyed 600 locomotives in ten weeks during June, July and
August of 1944. Our greatest debt to the resistance fighters
is for the delays of two weeks or more which they imposed on
one panzer division moving north from Toulouse, two from
Poland, and two from the Russian front as they crossed France
to reinforce the Normandy beachhead, We will never know how
many Allied soldiers owe their lives to these brave Frenchmen.
The French resistance forces continued their magnificent
work throughout the liberation of France, and when it was all
over, General Eisenhower said, "...In no previous war and in no
other theatre during this war have resistance forces been so
closely harnessed to the main military effort....I consider
that the disruption of enemy rail communications, the harassing
of German road works and the continual and increasing strain
placed on the German war economy and internal services
throughout occupied Europe by the organized forces of
resistance, played a very considerable part in our complete and
final victory..,,"
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At the end of World War II President Truman was persuaded
that in peacetime the United States would not need the kind of
central and strategic intelligence service that OSS had
provided. He therefore dissolved OSS in October 1945, soon
after V-J Day.
The Soviet seizure of Czechoslovakia and threats to Iran,
Turkey and Greece showed that Harry Truman had acted too
quickly. After a long debate, in which General Donovan and
others who had served in OSS played an important part, the
Central Intelligence Agency was established in September 1947,
by the same National Security Act that created the Secretary of
Defense, an independent Air Force and the National Security
Council. CIA's origins in the wartime OSS were evident in its
leadership, which has been dominated by former OSS officers, by
its functions, which are largely the same as those that OSS
performed in World War II, and by its role in government, which
is close to the vision that General Donovan had for OSS.
Yet while CIA's legacy from OSS is large and important, CIA
today is very different from OSS in World War II. As one who
served in OSS in the second war and in CIA since 1981, I am
keenly aware that the world CIA lives in, and the problems it
deals with, are infinitely more complex, variegated and
difficult than those we faced in World War II. Signals
intelligence has come a long way since Ultra and Magic, and we
have capabilities in overhead reconnaissance today that could
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not even have been dreamed of forty years ago. Constantly
developing technical systems that cost billions of dollars now
produce enormous amounts of intelligence. In the World War II
emergency we did a remarkable Job of transforming talented and
patriotic amateurs into competent and effective intelligence
operators whose sole mission was to win the war against the
Axis powers.
Today CIA has developed a highly training and disciplined
corps of career intelligence professionals who can cope with
vastly more complicated and diffuse challenges. We have a host
of new missions, in such areas as international debt,
technology transfer, gauging foreign industrial competition and
the implication for US security, helping to stop the
international flow of narcotics, and fighting against
terrorism, Even in our central traditional role of assessing
our potential adversaries' strategic capabilities we find
counting Soviet mobile ICBMs a very different and more
complicated enterprise than tracking Wehrmacht divisions.
But we can perhaps make too much of these differences.
There are still lessons to be learned, and insights to be
gained, from the World War II experience of OSS. During the
Vietnam War, I'm afraid we forgot our World War II experience
in resistance warfare. There we took over a losing war from
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locals, ready to fight for their homeland, who might have won
it if intelligently supported and directed and if the external
support provided the invaders had been effectively restricted.
In the aftermath of Vietnam, the challenge that we failed
to handle effectively there has only proliferated. The Soviet
Union soon began to test whether the U.S. would resist foreign
provoked and supported instability and insurgency elsewhere in
the Third World. Fully aware of the political climate in this
country, it developed an aggressive strategy which avoided
direct confrontation and instead took maximum advantage of
Third World forces or surrogates to obtain Soviet objectives.
This enabled Moscow to deny involvement, label such conflicts
as internal and warn self-righteously against "outside
interference",
Over the last several years, the Soviets and their allies
have supported directly or indirectly radical regimes or
insurgencies in more than a dozen countries in every part of
the Third World. It is also no coincidence that these
subversive efforts supported by the Soviets and their allies
are occurring close to the natural resources and the choke
points of sealanes on which the U.S. and its allies must rely
to fuel and supply their economic life. Time and again we have
watched the Soviets and their surrogates move in to exploit and
instigate social and economic discontent. They gain an
insurgent base, expand it with trained men and military arms,
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sabotage economic targets, drive out investment, and wait for
another plum to fall. Since 1972 five nations have extricated
themselves from Soviet grasp and 25 nations have fallen under a
significantly increased degree of Soviet influence or
insurgency supported by the Soviets or their proxies.
And now we have begun to witness a new phenomenon. Moscow
now finds itself supporting high cost, long-term efforts to
maintain in power the regimes they have installed or coopted in
places like Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia, Cambodia,
Mozambique, Yemen and Nicaragua -- a reversal of the roles
played by the United States and the communists in Vietnam. In
my opinion, this amounts to something.of an historical turning
point in the last half of this century whose significance has
not yet been fully appreciated and assessed by informed public
opinion or, perhaps, even by historians.
In seeking to stem subversion in the Third World and in
attempting to help local populations resist Soviet-backed
repressive Third World regimes, the United States and its
allies can indeed apply our historical experiences in
supporting resistance forces. El Salvador is a good example of
how these old lessons can be successfully applied to help a
beleaguered nation defend itself. The successful free
elections that have been held in El Salvador were made possible
largely by our help in developing new intelligence sources and
showing the El Salvadoran army how to use intelligence to break
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up guerrilla formations before they could attack provincial
capitals in order to disrupt voting. The dramatically improved
security situation there has been due largely to a relatively
modest training effort on our part which has imparted new
capabilities to the government army. Today El Salvador has a
popularly elected government and a population that has
overwhelmingly reJected insurgents organized, supplied and
directed from Cuba and Nicaragua.
And what about Nicaragua? In my opinion Nicaragua can and
should be a perfect example of how some of our experiences in
World War II can be applied with great effect in support of a
resistance movement. During the debate on the renewal of
United States aid to the Nicaraguan resistance, a number of
misconceptions about the nature and effectiveness of resistance
to oppressive governments have surfaced. For example, its been
said that there is no way the hundreds of millions of dollars
the Soviets are providing the Sandinistas could be matched, or
that the insurgents will never have the military power to match
the governments' might. We hear that a resistance movement
should be totally self-sufficient and that external support
would undermine its legitimacy. These arguments, of course,
ignore our experiences with the resistance in World War 11 and
reflect a basic misunderstanding about the way insurgencies and
resistance movements work.
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The truth, revealed in our World War II experiences and
numerous struggles in the Third World since then, is that far
fewer people and weapons are needed to put a government on the
defensive than are needed to protect it. A resistance movement
does not seek a classic and military definitive military
victory. External support is almost always a key factor in
resistance success. A progressive withdrawal of domestic
support for a government accompanied by nagging military
pressure largely against economic targets is what helps bring
down or alter a repressive government.
The small and weak countries which are combatting Soviet
inspired subversion and the resistance movements which are
combatting Marxist-Leninist repression do not need and cannot
handle a lot of sophisticated military hardware. What they
need is what always has been needed in these kinds of
situations, training in small arms and their use in small unit
actions, good intelligence, and good communications. We helped
provide this with effect to the resistance against Nazi Germany
and if we can muster our resolve and act before resistance
assets are allowed to wither away, we can put these tactics to
good use today.
In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, its still worth
talking about how the OSS and the British SOE helped the French
resistance forces and contributed to the defeat of Nazi Germany
because I'm convinced that our success in that work can teach
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us something about how we can meet our global responsibilities
today. With a relatively few skilled officers and a tiny
fraction of our military budget we can introduce new elements
of stability into the Third World and check Third World
Marxist-Leninist regimes that are stamping out democratic
liberties and human rights and posing a threat to our own
national security. Thank you.
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