PRESENTATION BY DR. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI TO THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90G00152R001102310003-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 27
• Document Creation Date: December 27, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 23, 2011
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: September 24, 1987
• Content Type: MISC

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STAT
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ROUTING AND RECORD SHEET
SUBJECT: (Optional)
Presentation by Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski
FROM: Office of the Director of
Training and Education
EXTENSION
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L3 V do 6, X
1026 CofC
DATE 13 October 1987
TO: (Offker designation, room number, and
building)
DATE
OFFICER'S
COMMENTS (Number eoch comment to show from whom
RECEIVED
FORWARDED
INITIALS
to whom. Draw a line across column after each comment.)
1. Executive Registry
7E12 Headquarters
STAT
2.
Council to the Director o
Central Intelli ence
Per your request, attached
is a copy of Dr. Brzezinski's
talk to the CIA on 24 September.
4. 7D60 Headquarters
A copy has been hand delivered
to Dr. Brzezinski.
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STAT
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Exec
FOR
I-79M 610 EDITIONS
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PRESENTATION BY
DR. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI
TO THE
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
24 SEPTEMBER 1987
Bob, Director, ladies and gentlemen, let me first of all say
how very genuinely pleased I am to be here. I am pleased for three
basic reasons. First of all, and I say this not to gain a
sympathetic audience, but because I genuinely feel so, I consider
the Agency and the people who work in it, not only essential to the
U.S. national security, but really to represent what American
Government has the best to offer. I have known the Agency over the
years, for many years in fact. In the early stages of my academic
career I developed a variety of contacts with the Agency and I have
always been enormously impressed by the ability, the dedication, the
intelligence of the people working in this Agency. There was a time
when people working here were getting the credit they 1eserved from
the nation at large and that was rewarding and gratifying. There
was a time when this was not the case, and it was frustrating and
unjust. I think we are back to the days when the country at large,
in the main, understands not only the centrality of what is being
done here and by your colleagues abroad, but understands also that
the people who serve here do so out of commitment, out of
patriotism, and are making a very vital contribution. In my own
personal experience in Government, I never had better people
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working for me than people from the Agency. So, it really is for me
a source of deep satisfaction to be able to stand on this podium and
to speak to you.
Secondly, it is a pleasure to be in an institution headed by
Judge Webster, whom I have known over the years and with whom I
collaborated when I was serving in the White House and whose
leadership and integrity qualities are not only well established but
generally hailed. I think it is really a felicitous coincidence of
events that he can now head this important Agency. And added to his
many attributes is the fact that he, unfortunately, is a better
tennis player than I am.
And the last, but not least, it is really a very special
opportunity to stand here having been introduced by my former
associate, Bob Gates. Bob Gates worked with me in the White House
and throughout his service I was impressed by his insights, indeed
his wisdom. One of the first things he said to me when I assumed
office was, "You and the DCI should be natural allies. You should
work together." Well, I tried, and I thought his wisdom was well
taken. In any case, I am delighted to see him here and I know that
he has contributed enormously to the analytical and overall
organizational high standards that this Agency has been setting over
the years.
This is by way of introduction, I want to say, because I really
feel this way. Let me begin by telling you what it is I intend to
talk to you about, as the basis for some exchange of views, and then
let me do what I intend to do. I intend to focus my remarks on the
American Soviet relationship, since clearly that is still the
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central geostrategic relationship in the world, though I do not
slight the importance of other problems. Nonetheless, for quite a
few years to come it is this relationship that will be the central
preoccupation insofar as our national security is concerned, and
hence I will focus on it. In .doing so, I will first focus on the
broad geopolitical trends as I see them. Secondly, I will raise
some questions that I consider to be of major importance for the
future. And then thirdly, in the light of the foregoing, I would
like to share with you some thoughts regarding the basic
intelligence needs of the top policymakers as I see them in the
light of my own perception of the situation, and, indeed, also my
own experience. So that is the agenda that I propose to cover.
Broad geopolitical trends. The point of departure for any
discussion of broad geopolitical trends in the American-Soviet
relationship is to identify the foci side of the American-Soviet
contest, and in my judgment, that contest manifests itself primarily
in three areas which can be identified and which I have tried to
identify in some of my writings as the three central strategic
fronts of the American-Soviet rivalry. And these, to put it very
neatly, and somewhat obviously, are the Western front, the Eastern
front, and the Southwestern front--all of them involved in the
continent of Eurasia. But to this day and since 1945, the
American-Soviet contest is ultimately centered on the question as to
who will or will not control the Eurasian continent, and it thus
pits a very major transoceanic power against a very major land mass
power. That land mass power normally would dominate the Eurasian
continent. It seizes on historical destiny, as so predisposed
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and certainly after World War II with the destruction both in
Western Europe and in the Far East, the Soviet Union was in a
position to assert preponderance over all of Eurasia. It was the
entrance into the picture of the transoceanic power which
established bridgeheads on the fringes of this enormous Eurasian
continent that altered the emerging power situation and, indeed,
provided then for the ongoing rivalry that has lasted to this day.
For just as the main land mass power, the Soviet Union, sees its
sway over this entire continent as a logical outcome of its
geopolitical position, so too the transoceanic power across the
seas, the United States, with the two oceans on its sides, sees
these oceans as an extension of its influence, and, therefore, those
entities on the peripheries of Eurasia that are culturally related
to it as normal extensions of its own power. And thus it is not an
historical accident nor an aberration that the Western European
peninsula, which, in fact, is a small extension of the Eurasian
continent, became allied with the United States, and that the United
States established an entrenched bridgehead on the Far East, in
Japan and South Korea.
And that represents the first two fronts and in the last 15
years a third front was emerged, the Southwest Asian front,
involving that area that includes Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and
the height which is the Persian Gulf. For many years this was not
the area of American-Soviet contestation. American allies were
politically preponderant but the area was not a focal point of
contest. In the last 15 years it has become that--in the wake of
the collapse of Iran and the Soviet aggression into Afghanistan.
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Till then the Persian Gulf region was sheltered by a strategic line
which could be drawn across the northern frontiers of Turkey, Iran,
northwest Pakistan, with Afghanistan as a neutral buffer. The
neutral buffer is gone. Iran has defected, so to speak, from the
American camp and is subject to internecine warfare and potential
instability. Pakistan is threatened. And, thus, this has emerged
as a major contestation zone in the American-Soviet rivalry.
Of these three fronts, looking ahead, I think one is justified
in saying that the most stable, politically and militarily, is the
Far East area. It is unlikely that in the foreseeable future, by
which one means five to ten years ahead, fundamental changes will
take place. To be sure there could be some spark igniting a new
conflict - let's say North versus South Korea - but, by and large,
the geopolitical strategic lines have been firmly drawn and are
based on the reality of a growing capacity of Japan, on the reality
of a firm statehood existing in China, and the prospects for
increased Chinese modernization, on the fact that there aren't too
many possibilities for significant military or political
breakthrough's.
The most dangerous front, clearly, is the third front. It is
the front in which there is the possibility simultaneously for
political upheaval, ideological revolution, and military
confrontation, and it is unlikely the situation will alter. Indeed,
it may become worse in the course of the next five to ten years.
And thus, this is the area where there is the highest potential for
some direct American-Soviet collision, if not at least indirect
collision, of the type that has already been taking place in
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Afghanistan and through shadow-boxing even currently in the Persian
The first front, the Far Western front, which involves Europe,
in my judgment, is not susceptible to change militarily, but it is
susceptible to political change, perhaps. Because on both sides of
the dividing line a more fluid political situation is developing,
and while it is unlikely that political change would produce
fundamentally different consequences from what exists today,
nonetheless, it could induce qualitatively important changes. In
the West, there is no doubt that there is some propensity towards
neutralism. There is some anxiety about relationship with the
United States. There is, of course, in the case of the Germans, a
magnetic attraction towards the East, partially motivated by
national, partially motivated by economic impulses. And in Eastern
Europe, of course, you have the process underway increasing the
physical, whic-th can best be described by the,,-words organic rejection
of a doctrine and a system imposed on the region on the basis of a
totally alien historical experience. And this process is gaining
momentum. It is gaining momentum.
And thus, in Europe, on the first central strategic front,
there is the potential for political change but probably, in my
judgment, with the highest probability without a military
confrontation. In the Far East, on the second central strategic
front, I see continued political, economic, ideological competition,
but with the lines relatively stable and firmly drawn, and no basic
alteration for the balance. And in the third front, there is the
potential for collision, upheaval and uncertainty. And this is the
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way I perceive, therefore, the true political structure of the
American-Soviet rivalry.
In that context, two further points should be made. The Soviet
Union, in being a rival to the United States, remains and will
remain for a long time to come a unique historical rival. Unique
historically. Unique in that it is unlike any previous rival for
regional or global preponderance. Global rivalry between an
established number one power and a rising anti-status quo power is
not new. That has been the central reality of international affairs
for centuries--whether one thinks of Britain and Spain, or the
struggle for continental supremacy between England and France, or
between-clusters of continental powers, or even more recently the
two world wars. That is normal reality. But what has been
characteristic of that reality was that the number one was always
challenged by number two on a comprehensive basis. The power that
preponderated was a preponderant military power, cultural power,
financial power, economic power and the challenger tended to offer
challenge in all of these dimensions. Napoleonic France was as much
a potential-military power, though more of a land power than naval
power, than Britain. It offered a cultural challenge as well. A
powerful cultural challenge. It had the wherewithal for
establishment of financial economic preponderance with the European
system, had it emerged supreme. The same thing can be said in
different ways, even of Germany, in the two world wars, and the
democratic powers.
What is unique about the Soviet challenge is that it is
entirely one dimensional. It is only in the military area. There
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was a time, until recently, that the Soviet Union offered some
additional challenges. It offered for awhile an ideological
challenge. More so in the 20's than in the 30's. Somewhat more
again in the late 40's because of the prestige of its victory in
World War II, continuing into the 50's, but then increasingly
declining. Today the Soviet Union is not an ideological rival.
Today the Soviet Union is quite literally an ideological
embarrassment even to the International Communist movement. There
isn't a single Communist party around the world that will state in
its program, which is designed to gain adherents for it, that if it
wins power it will build a system in the country it will dominate,
emulating the Soviet experience. It still would have said that 20
years ago. Today every Communist party goes out of its way to tell
you that, if it comes to power, it will avoid the mistakes of the
Soviet experience. That is its main thrust--in some cases very
explicitly so, such as the Italian Communist Party. You know the
case obliquely. An International Communist movement is in desperate
search of a model. There really isn't very many models for it
anymore because all models look pretty bad. But the Soviet Union
ideologically is not a rival. It really has no longer any
ideological cultural appeal - none. And what's more, the Soviet
leaders now, at least some of them, recognize this.
The Soviet Union at least for awhile, was an economic rival to
the United States. Khrushchev, as recently as of 25 years ago,
predicted explicitly and had the prediction enshrined in the party
program, that the Soviet Union would surpass the United States
economically by 1970 and in per capita terms in 1980. That
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prediction has been shamefacedly depleted from the last Soviet party
program adopted within the last two years because it is an
embarrassing reminder of what has happened in the last 25 years.
Not only the relative, but the absolute gap between the United
States and the Soviet Union has widened. I do not speak here even
of the qualitative gap. Today the United States has 45 times as
many computers per head as the Soviet Union to take but just one
example, and there are many others in different areas of high
science and ultratech. The fact is the Soviet Union is not an
economic rival. It is not an ideological rival. Financially it has
nothing to offer the world community were it to emerge as a
governing power. It is clinging desperately to the status of parity
on the basis of military power and it is trying to use its military
power to enhance the scope of its influence and to place the United
States on the defensive, particularly in the unguarded historical
contestation for Eurasia. And it is using that military power
skillfully and well, and we should not underestimate its
importance. We should also bear in mind that it is a one
dimensional'rival, which if checkmated militarily effectively,
really ceases to be a very major rival and Soviet leaders know
that. But our own capacity to respond depends then on our
understanding of the problem and our national preoccupations, and
that leads me to the further point on this discussion of basic
geopolitical trends, namely our own future and our own capacity to
sustain the rivalry.
Here the big question mark I have is whether we do have the
national will, the national perspective, the national determination,
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to carry on that rivalry in a manner permitting us eventually to
prevail by winning successively in the different phases of the
competition. We have won ideologically. We have won economically.
We must prevail militarily in some fashion depending on how one
wishes to define that. And here the question marks are real. They
are not speculative. First of all, I think there is a real danger
that if the situation in Central America gets out of hand, if we
mismanage that issue, as I think the prospects are reasonably high
that we will, the problem will get worse. And as the problem gets
worse in Central America, it will probably begin to merge with a
wider series of difficulties in the Caribbean and particularly in
Mexico. The situation in Haiti is getting bad from day to day. The
situation in Mexico is ambivalent and ambiguous at best, but the
underlying trends certainly give you pause and give you grounds for
concern. Were these issues in a cluster to begin to explode, I
think there is real, real danger that our preoccupation with
security problems will divert it Southward. That is all we will
think about. Our capacity to sustain our global engagement will be
weakened and in that context we may find it difficult to sustain the
kind of commitments we have assumed.
Necessarily connected with it is the question mark about our
economic prospects. It is probable that in the course of the next
administration-we will have a recession. We haven't had one. The
cyclical thrust indicates that we should expect one some time in the
course of the next five or six years and that will certainly effect
also our capacity to operate. Accumulatively this will impose major
strains on our defense budget, force us into some major
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reallocations, and could affect adversely our capacity to exploit
the advantages that historically have accrued to us in the course of
our competition with the Soviets, and make it more difficult for us
to push forward with the strategy designed to alter the nature of
the American-Soviet relationship in a fashion that would permit us
retroactively then to conclude that, in fact, we have prevailed.
All of that, of course, is premised on a series of more
specific questions regarding the future, and let me turn to these
because, perhaps, these may also be matters we will wish to discuss
jointly, and I would like simply to register some of the questions
marks and make some preliminary comments about some of these larger
issues that we need to ponder.
Clearly, the central question of American-Soviet relationship
is the internal future of the Soviet Union. What can we expect in
the course of the next decade? What more specifically in the
context of the frameworky that I have outlined can we anticipate for
Gorbachev and for the Soviet Union? There is a tendency, I think,
in our public analysis to oscillate between optimism about the scale
of change and pessimism based on historical analogies drawn
particularly from Khrushchev's experience. My own inclination is to
be skeptical about both. The limits to internal reform in the
Soviet Union, in my judgment, are very sharply drawn, but it doesn't
follow from it that the Khrushchevian experience needs to be
replicated.
The major stumbling block to Soviet reform, in my judgment, in
addition to the obvious institutional impediments, is something much
more fundamental. And that is the central fact that political
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economic reform is being explored and its scope is being defined in
a preliminary sense in a multi-national empire. That to me is the
central question and the central dimension of political change in
the Soviet Union.
For years I have argued that in our assessment of the Soviet
Union we have not given sufficient importance to the fact that we
are dealing with a multi-national empire, and that we have permitted
our own public consciousness, our own vision of the Soviet Union,
produce an identity between it and the word Russia. Whereas, in
fact, the Soviet Union is not Russia. The Soviet Union is a Russian
empire which exists in the age of nationalism. And any reform in
the Soviet Union is bound to confront that reality, as it already
has started even more rapidly than I had expected - having for years
argued that this is the Achilles heel and potentially the central
issue for the remaining decades of the. century for the Soviet
UniQn._ But what has happened in Kazakhstan or Vilnyus or-Riga are
preliminaries to what is likely to happen subsequently in Kiev, and
Lvov, and Tbilisi, and Yerevan, and elsewhere. And that is going to
pose a very sharp challenge to the Soviet reformers. Because, in
effect, it will force them to confront a problem that you cannot
have far reaching economic reform without political consequences.
And political consequences are related to political culture and
political self-identity.
To put it differently, you can reform China by decentralizing
it economically, and it still remains China politically. Can you
reform the Soviet Union economically and still remain the Soviet
Union politically? That is the question in the age of nationalism
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and it is not an easy one to answer given the inbuilt intolerance,
the inbuilt suppression, the inbuilt bitter memories of the past,
and the subterranean reality of national life in the Soviet Union.
There was a wonderful article in Literaturnaya Gazeta that some
of you may have read - those of you who follow Soviet affairs - on
Sufism, and it was based entirely on Western sources. What was so
striking to me was there was an admission by the Soviets that this
underground political religious life exists and it wouldn't have
been printed if it wasn't an acknowledgment of something that was
far reaching.
Similarly we need to think in this context of the nature of
political change in Eastern Europe. I have already spoken about the
turmoil and change in Eastern Europe. I have suggested Eastern
Europe is politically subject to change. But the deeper question to
which an answer needs to be sought is what kind of political change
will produce what kind of new political elites? The East European
political elite is changing at the highest level quite obviously
because of the imminence of the problems of succession. But a
deeper change is taking place within it in terms of ideological
evolution, in terms of professional change, in terms of cultural
identity and what kind of a political elite is likely to dominate
these European countries. I have recently been to Hungary and to
Poland and I was struck, particularly in Hungary, by the changes in
the character of the political elite. That is to say, there is a
qualitative transformation in their mental set, in their cultural
mold, in their view of the world, irrespective of their ideological
self-identification and institution loyalty. It really is less
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important what subjectively they think they are and more important
to ask what objectively have they become. And the same set of
questions, I think, pertains to Eastern Europe because it is
pregnant with political consequences.
We need also to think hard about changes in the strategic realm
in connection with the foregoing. We know, of course, that
geostrategic change is driven both by budgets and by technology.
And here I think we may well be on the brink of some fundamental
changes as well which will impose new intellectual tasks on us. For
one thing, we may well be coming to the end of the era in which
offensive military systems have dominated over defensive systems.
The initiation of that era in military warfare can be precisely
timed in 1917, not because of the Bolshevik revolution, but because
of introduction of the aircraft and the tank into the last phases of
World War I. And that produced, in its wake, a very basic change of
theme concepts of warfare. Till then, somewhere from the
mid-nineteenth century, roughly from the American Civil War,
defensive fire power, particularly built around the machine gun and
artillery, preponderated and inflicted high casualties on rather
static military forces. The introduction of the tank and the plane
introduced mobility. It produced a number of theorists ranging from
Mitchell here to Tukhachevskiy in the Soviet Union to Douhet in
Italy to Guderian in Germany, who thought through the notion of
rapidity of maneuver, rapid breakthrough exploitation and produced,
in effect, the era dominated by offensive warfare. And the high
point of that, of course, was reached with the introduction of
nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles which put a
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premium on offensive warfare to a point that we have both adopted
offensive strategies of a suicidal type.
The fact is that this has not only become expensive but,
perhaps, increasingly redundant. Modern technology is producing the
possibility now of favorable trade-offs for defensive systems, both
on the strategic and non-strategic levels and the question that
arises for the future is how the two will be assimilated and in what
fashion and with what strategic consequences. And that, of course,
imposes the prospects of very basic strategic changes in our
respective postures. Particularly it is symbiotic defense-offensive
strategy gradually adopted as I think it will be by both sides. And
it will impose, of course, enormous obligations for much heightened
verification capacities, particularly on the part of the United
States, because both systems are likely to be relatively mobile.
And hence the main tendency of the balance between offense and
defense in your own strategy will be as important as also the
maintenance of the balance in our relationship with our opponent.
Related to all of this, of course, will be subordinate
questions such as how do we maintain a defensiveness of our
alliances, what kind of technological innovation will have to be
assimilated by them with what kind of political consequences. These
are all large strategic questions which loom on the horizon and
which are likely to be confronted by our political leadership in the
not too distant future.
And that brings me to the third and concluding part of my
comments to you, my sharing of some informal thoughts with you -
namely what are the needs of top policymakers in so far as
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intelligence is concerned. Now here, of course, I will speak to
some extent objectively, but, hopefully, generalizing somewhat
beyond some of my own personal experiences, interests and
proclivities. I would put it this way, the top political
decisionmakers need intelligence of three types - they need
political intelligence, they need geopolitical intelligence, and
they need strategic intelligence.
By political intelligence, I mean something quite simple
and yet terribly important. A top policymaker truly needs to know,
to the extent that it is possible to know, what is the strategizing
of our adversary. How is our enemy formulating this strategy, what
is the nature of our enemy's strategy and tactics? The more
specifically one knows that the better, because that is absolutely
central to the process of decision making oneself. The more one
knows about that, the better one is off in one's own decision
making, the less one operates in the darkroom with the windows drawn
and the lights shut off, which is often the case, figuratively
speaking, when one sits in the situation room at the White House.
What we can'know about our enemy's intentions and plans is
absolutely central. And that, of course, involves very high
reliance on human penetration of other governments and,
particularly, the most hostile governments. It involves, of course,
intercepts, decoding, and long range plans in the other side's
officialdom.
I know, for example, that in the efforts to deter the Soviet
Union from invading Poland in December of 1980, information provided
from this building, and obtained from a courageous Polish colonel,
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who for reasons of patriotism, decided to volunteer such information
to. the United States, and who himself was integrally related to not
only the Polish high command but to the Warsaw high command, was of
absolutely central importance in the kinds of consultations,
debates, and decisions that we made in the White House. It was
literally directly related. The fact that we had that information,
the fact that we knew what the timing was, the fact that we knew
what the military dispositions were, the fact that we knew what some
of the political considerations involved were, enabled us very
deliberately to do what we did, and to draw certain lessons from
past experiences where we didn't do what we needed to do, in part
because we knew less. Particularly in mind is the experience of
1968, where both our decision making and our substantive information
was less than adequate. And that was absolutely essential. And
this is the kind of political intelligence which informs
decisionmakers in a manner which is absolutely essential to that
grand chess game - it is is if one knew what your opponent was
planning to make for his next three or four moves. And I consider
that kind of political intelligence to be absolutely essential.
Second is geopolitical intelligence which is also very
important. By geopolitical intelligence and, again I am looking at
it from a vantage point of the decisionmaker, you may have different
categories for describing the same things and you may structure the
argument differently, but I am trying to give you a sense of how it
looks to us. By geopolitical intelligence, I mean essentially some
refined understanding of politically significant trends. That is to
say, some definition of the larger thrust of historical change.
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What can one anticipate as the broad secular dynamics within the
Soviet Union more specifically. What can one project forward as the
limits or scope of Sino-Soviet accommodation and how far is it
likely to go. With what kind of policy implications for each of the
two major powers? With what kind of political changes in
theirleadership? What is the likely scope and outer limits of the
national questions of the Soviet Union? What kind of developments
one can reasonably anticipated, with what kind of tradeoffs and
consequences for other policies, such as economic decentralization,
Glasnost, the organization of political power in relations to
outside countries. This kind of geopolitical intelligence provides
the framework for the political intelligence within which then our
top policymakers have to make their decisions. This is not easy to
do, but it is very important.
And the third strategic intelligence, by which I mean what do
our opponents have; what kind of assets and leverage can they weld;
what are the tangible and intangible dimensions of their power which
they can apply against us in the pursuit of their strategy and in
keeping with historical trends as intelligence items defined? But
more importantly than what they have is even the question, what can
they do with it? For in my judgment the truly part of any net
assessment is not an identification of what the other side has, but
an intelligence discussion of what it can do with it. What is the
importance of certain margins of advantage or the unimportance of
these margins of advantage? What can they actually and practically
do either with their military assets or with their political
opportunities or with whatever else has been identified as providing
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the capacity for the other side to act?
Now, in the light of my own experience but also beyond it in
the sense that I have been involved in a variety ways with this
administration on some sensitive national security matters and I was
previously involved, also marginally, in some other administrations,
but particularly based on my own experience, I would say
categorically that you perform brilliantly and effectively with
regards to the third. That is to say, in terms of strategic
intelligence, I think what the U.S. decisionmakers obtain from you
is absolutely first-rate and, in my judgment, better than any other
leadership in the world obtains from its intelligence services. It
is extremely well done, well structured and especially in the first
half of the third requirement. That is to say, what do our
opponents have in so far as strategic intelligence is concerned. In
terms of what they can do with it, I think there is room for
improvement. For that requires more refined judgments, perhaps some
speculative judgments, but it is the area of assessment which, of
course, is of critical importance to the decisionmaker.
When it comes to the second category, geopolitical
intelligence, I would say the record is so-so. On the record is
so-so largely because of the culture imperatives of our own society
of which we are all products and the culture imperatives of our own
society make us uncongenial to the acquisition of a feel for other
societies. Largely because we neither teach history nor geography.
Largely because, in the absence of history and geography, we really
cannot successfully, intellectually empathize with what makes other
societies tick. And unless we do so we do not understand really
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well how other societies evolve and change. I think this is a very
basic intellectual failure of our society which one senses, not only
here, but which one senses very much, for example in the
journalistic community. Where journalism is equally uninformed when
it comes to trends and, therefore, finds refuge in a preoccupation
with events or hard disparate facts. I often say that Americans
have more access to more information about the world than any people
in the world and probably understand it less than many people in the
world. Largely because facts by themselves are not sufficient.
Facts are only, or should be, only links in a large chain. But that
link is established is established by an understanding of history
and geography and the interrelationship between the two, by which I
subsume also literature, religion, outlook, cultural behavior of
different people in different circumstances. And that is critically
essential to an understanding of what might be called geopolitical
trends.
We are weakest still, despite improvements made over the last
number of years, in the area of political intelligence. Here to
this day, on many crucial issues top policymakers operate in the
semi-dark, if not in total darkness. The fact of the matter is that
we have not developed over the last several decades a tradition, a
pattern of behavior, which enables us to develop long range assets.
What is commonly called moles in sufficient numbers in governments
that are hostile to us. The situation has become somewhat better in
recent years and I am very cognizant of that, in spite of some
losses, but by and large we are deficient in this respect , in my
judgment, in comparison to several intelligence services in the
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world. But not only of an adversary type - some, perhaps, of a
semiadversary type. But the fact is that we simply do not have
the kind of assets that we should have and certainly after 40
years of sustained efforts we should have by now developed. And
these seeds take a long time to mature and to blossom and they
have to be planted early and they have to be cultivated and one
has to develop again a whole tradition of operations which
enables one to do so on a scale that is sufficient. But this is
where in my judgment, the deficiency still to this day is the
most acute.
Let me finally conclude by a brief word which is related to
the question of what the top policymakers need and that is the
process. How to translate for the decisionmakers information
that is helpful to them.
If the top decisionmakers know what they need, they will
ask for it. That-is., of course,- si.caple. .It makes it easy for_.
the DCI, makes it easy for the Agency. The problem is that more
often than not the top decisionmakers don't know what they
need. And there are periods when top decisionmakers are more
ignorant than at other times and there have been such times.
And the more ignorant a top decisionmaker is about the world the
less likely he is to ask the right questions and to know what he
wants. And one has to face the fact that there are times inpur
political history when the President or the National Security
Advisor or the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense or
all of them are to a large extent ignorant. In which case it
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puts even a higher premium on the DCI and the Agency to provide
what is needed. As I said, there are times when they know what
to ask. There are times when some of them know more than others
and there are times when none of them know. And this is
essential, therefore, to make sure that the President and his
chief advisors have an awareness of the larger strategic and
trend dimensions of international affairs and are not merely
informed about facts. Not just facts which are, of course,
interesting in themselves, but above all else infusion into
their mindset of the notion of strategic change and of
historical trends. And that to me is a central educational role
that the Agency and the Director can play in regards to
intelligence, and in regards particularly to the intelligence
that the top policymakers need. That means, in turn, that the
Agency itself, in feeding material to top policymakers, has to
,,stress these dimensions of strategic change and histor.jcal~
trends and package its information in that context so that that
message comes through loud and clear and begins to inform the
mind of the recipient.
Secondly, I think it is terribly important to use the
President's Daily Brief to that end and to use regular access to
the President for that purpose. For the access to the
President, either through the Daily Brief or through regularly
scheduled briefing sessions, should not be used to convey
information as from time to time in the past primarily it had
been, but it should be used to infuse the President's mind with
strategic intelligence, to shape his sense of the world, to
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inform him in a dynamic sense of what is happening on the world
scene. Transferral of facts in the Presidential briefing, in my
mind, is not a useful employment of that time, as it was the
problem occasionally over the years past. It is an opportunity
to structure the President's vision and it is a very special
opportunity. If one can structure the President's vision of the
world one is determining his understanding of the world and one
is really then shaping policy. The Agency is not to shape
policy, of course, but the Agency is not irrelevant to policy
and if one's vision of the world gets shaped by informed
frameworks, one is really influencing policy in the most
decisive of ways and that is a very special opportunity for an
Agency that is supposed to produce intelligence. Intelligence
meaning a broad strategic vision.
Thirdly, I think it is essential that the DCI and the top
officials participate regularly and frequently in formal top
strategizing sessions. That is to say, sessions which really
define longer range policy thrusts. And that, in turn, means
that equally important is their participation in informal
sessions of that type, for a great deal of policy is made
informally either through ad hoc meetings engaging the President
and his top advisors, or quite often informal meetings just of
two or three of the President's top decisionmakers. The
breakfast or lunch between the Secretary of State and the
Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, can be a
terribly important mechanism for shaping, on an ad hoc basis,
and incrementally what becomes national strategy. And hence
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direct involvement in that is critical. It is not easy to
achieve. There are bureaucratic obstacles to it. In the past
there have even been personal obstacles to it in the sense that
some people were deliberately excluded. But it is very
important to overcome that if the process that emanates from
here is to infuse the decision making with that critical
dimension of strategizing which is intelligence as the point of
departure for strategically organized process making.
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