STATEMENT BY W.E. COLBY DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE BEFORE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE UNION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00901R000500030007-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 7
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 28, 2000
• Sequence Number: 7
• Publication Date: October 9, 1975
• Content Type: SPEECH

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Statement
by
W. E. Colby
Director of Central Intelligence
before
American Conservative Union
October 9, 1975
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Many nations have investigated their intelligence
services. Sometimes this has been because of abuses,
suspected or real. Sometimes it is because of failings.
The United States investigated its intelligence services
after Pearl Harbor and drew the lesson of the need for
central intelligence, to draw together all the bits and
pieces of information available to our Government into
an overall assessment.
A major difference exists between foreign investiga-
tions and the one we are now conducting of American
intelligence. Most have appointed a respected individual
such as a judge, with full authority to conduct the investi-
gation in secrecy. In the fullness of time, he delivered
his final conclusions and recommendations after a sober and
serious review, unaccompanied by press coverage or leak.
Our present investigation is a legislative one. Some
subjects are indeed investigated in privacy, but some are
displayed to the TV cameras. The purpose is to ensure all
of us in America that we will have a responsible intelli-
gence service, one which will conform to our Constitution
and laws. But in this process, we Americans must be respon-
sible about the way we go about our investigation. We must
not call upon secrecy to hide failures or wrongs in our past,
as President Ford has clearly ordered. But if we yield to
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the temptation of sensation, we can hurt our safety. If we
only seek publicity, we can reduce our protection. Our
investigators must be responsible with respect to the sen-
sitive information they learn in privacy. And our intelli
gence personnel must be responsible to retain the secrets
they pledged to respect, as well as to follow the oath they
took to our Constitution and laws. We must draw the line
between what can and should be shared with our 214 million
fellow Americans, and this, inevitably, with our foreign
adversaries, and what all of us would agree should be con-
cealed so that our intelligence can work.
This responsibility is not only a political responsi-
bility; it is a moral responsibility. It is a responsibility
for the lives of our agents and for the livelihood of the
American companies and individuals who helped their govern-
ment with the assurance that their connection with intelli
gence would never be revealed. It is a responsibility for
the integrity of the work of our technicians who discovered
chinks in an adversary's armor which can be corrected if dis-
closed. Above all, it is a responsibility for the lives of
all Americans who seek safety and peace from the many threats
facing us in today's world and the world of the future.
We live in a dangerous world. A nuclear missile 30
minutes away is aimed and cocked at us here. The mutual
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deterrents we may have established with our major adversary
can be frustrated by the spread of easily manufactured
nuclear weapons to reckless despots or paranoiac terrorists.
The increasing interdependence of the world's economy, the
growing problems of over-population and under-production,
and the instability of a world order in which only about
thirty of the 142 United Nations share our democratic
standards of government, all. pose a danger to our country.
The rush of technology into new dimensions poses the hope
of its use for the settlement of human problems but also
the danger of its use in unexpected weapons systems.
Thus we need good intelligence today and we will need
it in the world of the 80's and 90's. We must not allow
ourselves to be hypnotized by the mistakes or even the
misdeeds of intelligence in the 50's and 60's so that we
are blinded to the problems ahead and deprive our country
of the intelligence needed to anticipate and meet them.
I do not say that we should not look backward and
learn lessons from the past. But when we look backwards,
let us look at the whole picture and not just the individual
incidents. Let us apply the intelligence doctrine of cen-
tralizing all the information before we make an overall
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assessment about our intelligence capabilities, not depend
only on one jigsaw piece. Let us see the good with the
bad. Let us see the big with the small. Let us add the
new to the old. Let us listen to the studious as well as
the brave. Let us learn from technology as well as the
library. Out of all these, we will see that we Americans
have the best intelligence in the world.
The best intelligence is not necessarily perfect. We
do not yet have, nor pretend to have, a crystal ball at the
CIA building. Rather, we centralize all the raw information
-- open, clandestine, technical. We subject it to rigorous
analysis by a corps of experts which cannot be matched in
any other country. Their products are educational in the best
sense of the word. They raise the level of understanding
of our Government of the forces and factors at work in the
world around us. Taking bits and pieces of information,
they draw precise measurements, not only of where hostile
weapons are today, but also of the development and deploy-
ment programs which will bring new weapons into existence
years ahead.
There are unknowables as well as unknowns in the world
around us. We make no pretension that our intelligence
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product is an advance copy of the World Almanac of 1977.
Rather our products give our national leadership a better
understanding of the problems ahead and the probabilities
that they may occur. We do not cry wolf every day, because
it is our obligation to help our Government avoid unnecessary
expenditure for defense as well as to warn of the need for
it. Our warnings stimulate our Government not only to take
measures to defend or deter against threats, but also
positively to negotiate them away. Thus intelligence today
contributes to peace rather than merely defends against war.
It provides the basis for resolving political and economic
problems rather than predicting their inevitable arrival.
I have said that we welcome responsible investigation.
I have admitted that there have been missteps in the past
28 years of our history. I insist that these have been
few and far between, indeed far fewer than would have
occurred in any community the size of our intelligence
agency over such a period. These have been presented
to our investigators by the intelligence community itself,
coming from our own self-examination and correction of
where we did not measure up.
But the rules of intelligence operations are not
confined to those taught in Miss Phoebe's dancing school.
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It is thus totally unjust to ask the dedicated men and
women of CIA who served their country at the front of
danger also to serve now as a national scapegoat for a
revision of our values and consensus of the past 20 years.
We must investigate our intelligence, but we must do so
in a responsible manner, so that we do not, five or ten years
from today, investigate why and how we destroyed our
intelligence in 1975.
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