A BAD YEAR FOR U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITIES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00901R000500060002-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: January 4, 2017
• Document Release Date: April 28, 2008
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: October 17, 1985
• Content Type: TRANS

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RADIO TV REPORTS, IN
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 (301) 656-406
FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS STAFF
PROGRAM All Things Considered STATION WAMU-FM
NPR Network
DATE October 17, 1985 7:00 PM CITY Washington, DC
SUBJECT A Bad Year for U.S. Intelligence Communities
SUSAN STAMBERG: All in all, it's been a bad year for the U.S.
intelligence community.
A month ago, a former CIA agent named Edward Lee Howard became the
latest U.S. citizen to be accused of passing government secrets to the
Russians. Howard is now on the lamb.
Back in May, John Walker, Jr., a former Navy officer, was arrested
along with an alleged ring of associates in the spy business.
In Los Angeles, the prosecution's just concluded arguments against
Rick Miller, the first FBI agent to be accused of espionage.
But, while things may look bad here, during the same period of
time the Soviets have lost at least three top spies to the West.
NPR's Allen Burlow examines the implications of all these spy
cases.
ALLEN BURLOW: With all of the defections, arrests and indictments
for spying this year, there's a natural tendency to ask, "Who's ahead?"
Most people who keep taps on this sort of thing agree that the Russians are
the big losers, but they also agree that the losses on the U.S. side are
substantial.
The case of Edward Lee Howard is the most recent to send shimmers
through the U.S. intelligence Community. Howard, a former CIA agent, was
forced out of the Agency in 1983 when he failed a lie detector test. At
the time, he was awaiting assignment to Moscow. Apparently disgruntled
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over his ouster, Howard allegedly sold information pertaining to CIA
operations and methods to a KGB agent in Austria. He disappeared on
September 20th. Howard was under surveillance by the FBI.
Why?
Well, the 33-year-old ex-CIA agent had apparently been fingered as
a spy by Vitaly Yurchenko who, until last July, held one of the top KGB
posts in the United States. In July, Yurchenko defected to the U.S. where
he is now reportedly being questioned by U.S. intelligence officials.
George Carver, a 27-year veteran of the CIA, assessed the loss of
Howard this way.
./~ GEORGE CARVER: The Howard case is serious but far from cata-
strophic. Howard was a relatively young and relatively junior officer who
served for 20-odd months who had been trained for a posting to Moscow but
had not actually been posted there, and he would have known a certain
amount about our activities for collecting intelligence on the Soviet
Union. He would have known manay things that we would vastly preferred for
the Soviets not to know.
BURLOW: But, Carver says, Howard's defection was far less
significant than the loss to the Soviets of Yurchenko in July, of Oleg
Gordievski, the head of KGB operations in Britain the same month, and
Sergei Bohan, a top Soviet military intelligence officer who defected in
May.
Senator Malcolm Wallop, a Wyoming Republican, offered this
assessment of the Soviet defections.
SENATOR MALCOLM WALLOP: I think both Yurchenko and Gordievski are
absolutely catastrophic events for Soviet intelligence. But, interestingly
enough, they are really the biggest pieces of an iceberg to be sure, but
nothing like the totality of the iceberg that the Soviet intelligence has
run into. There have been 15 to 20 major defections from Soviet intelli-
gence over the past year.
BURLOW: Former CIA Director William Colby says the number of spy
cases that have become public in a brief period of time is unusual, but not
unprecedented. Colby says the Soviet spies who moved West will be enorm-
ously valuable, and he suggests the fallout from the Gordievski defection
has only begun to be felt.
WILLIAM COLBY: The shoe yet to drop on him is who the Britons
were that he was in contact with, not just he but the other people there,
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and he was the-senior KGB officer. I'm certain he gave the British a lot
of information about who the KGB were and what they were doing in Britain.
If we had lost three of our senior officers in the last couple of
months, very senior officers in that service, we would be in an uproar.
The Congress would be demanding explanations. We would have a terrible
problem.
problem.
They have a terrible problem. We don't have that kind of a
BURLOW: Colby believes the recent spate of Soviet defections
should lay to rest the decade's old question of whether a Soviet agent or
mole has penetrated the CIA. He suggests that Yurchenko should have been
able to turn up a Soviet mole.
COLBY: As the number five man at the KGB, assuming he's telling
us all he knows, which is not quite clear yet and has to be checked -- but
if all he can come up with is this fellow who served in the CIA for a
couple of years in kind of a makeshift job, that isn't much of a mole.
BURLOW: The guy in the makeshift job was Edward Lee Howard.
Senator Wallop thinks the Howard defection was far more signifi-
cant, and Wallop also thinks it's likely a Soviet mole has been planted in
the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy. Wallop says there is an overriding
confidence in the U.S. spy agencies that such a person cannot exist, and
the Senator says this creates the perfect environment for placement of a
mole.
SENATOR WALLOP: We know that over the past 20 or 30 years on a
number of occasions we have penetrated the highest reaches of Soviet
government. I simply do not believe that the United States has such a
corner on the world's morality that it is impossible for us to have had
somebody planted a long time ago who has risen to a position that is now
significant enough that the Soviets may well have gotten an operational
mole. I don't know that to be the case. I don't even suspect anyone of
being the case, but I do suspect that it is implausible for it not to have
happened some place.
BURLOW: Howard's case is only one of many that have led to a
renewed discussion on Capitol Hill over how the U.S. can improve its
counter-intelligence capabilities -- that is, its protection of U.S.
documents, communications and facilities, its surveillance of our own spies
as well as efforts to root out Soviet attempts to plant disinformation.
The first case to focus the counter-intelligence issue was that of
John A. Walker, Jr., the retired Navy officer accused of masterminding a
spy ring that included his older brother, his son and his best friend. The
concern about spies has been further heightened by the defections last
month of a series of highly placed West German officials who went East.
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Senator Wallop says the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy is simply
not committed to counter-intelligence. Although there are reportedly
twelve hundred counter-intelligence agents in the FBI, Wallop says former
CIA Director Stansfield Turner totally resisted improving the Agency's
counter-intelligence while William Casey, the current Director, had to be
forced to make improvements.
SENATOR WALLOP: We have a counter-intelligence capability and,
clearly, anybody in the intelligence community will tell you. But, we
don't have a real commitment to it. That that we have was brought on board
very grudgingly. We pushed it upon the agency, and I do not yet sense that
there is a high commitment to its competence of its success.
BURLOW: Wallop says U.S. counter-intelligence failed to pickup on
Howard until he was fingered by Soviet defector Yurchenko and then, Wallop
says, the FBI let Howard get away.
Both House and Senate Intelligence Committees are currently
investigating the Howard case, trying to figure out how he got away and why
he was apparently given access to extremely sensitive material at an early
stage in his career.
The Congress has taken some steps to limit Soviet gains in the
intelligence arena. Both houses have approved a new death penalty law for
spying. President Reagan has signed a bill that requires numeric parity
between U.S. and Soviet spies operating in one another's country. There
are also efforts underway to force the U.S. to replace some-of the 200-odd
Soviet nationals now employed in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, and there are
proposals under consideration that would force a reduction in the number of
Soviet spies allowed in the U.S.
Former CIA agent George Carver, now at the Georgetown Center for
Strategic and International Studies, says that within the CIA itself the
U.S. can only go so far with counter-intelligence before it either in-
fringes on constitutional rights or create an unhealthy climate in the
intelligence community. Many in the spy Agency points to the mole hunt
conducted by former CIA Chief of Counter-intelligence James Angleton as the
kind of counter-intelligence operation the country doesn't need. That
investigation led to the destruction of several agents' careers and
seriously damaged morale at the CIA. No mole was found.
George Carver.
CARVER: There is an almost direct contradiction between many of
the operational imperatives affecting counter-intelligence, and many of the
legal, constitutional and moral imperatives of a free and open democratic
society. Doing counter-intelligence effectively requires harnessing two
very (word unitelligible) human qualities. You have to be a controlled
paranoid. And if the control slips, you're in bad trouble. And if the
paranoia slips, you're taking great risks.
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Now, -the kind of tightening up that some purists would want who
want absolute protection would not be constitutionally permissible in our
society. But, on the other hand, being an absolute constitutional A.C.L.U.
type of civil libertarian purist leaves you totally open to intelligence
attack by a determined and persistent advisary.
BURLOW: For intelligence work to be effective, agents must be
able to operate in an atmosphere of some trust. In the past, U.S. intelli-
gence agencies have resisted greater counter-intelligence out of fears of
damaging morale or of alienating their own agents. But, as the trials of
accused spies proceed, public outrage at the loss of state secrets is
likely to grow and along with it pressures for greater counter-intelligence
efforts.
I'm Allen Burlow, in Washington.
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KEENE SENTINEL(NH)
17 October 1985
Ex-CIA chief to address Chamber
William E. Colby, former direc-
tor of the U.S. Central li-
gence Agency, will speak
Tuesday, t. 29, at the annual
dinner of the Greater Keene
Chamber of Commerce.
The dinner will be at Keene
State College's Spaulding Gym-
nasium. The dinner is open to the
public, and tickets are available
at the Chamber office, 12 Gilbo
Ave., Keene. Cocktails begin at 6
p.m. and by a roast beef dinner
will be served at 7:30.
Colby began his intelligence ca-
reel during World War II, par-
achuting behind enemy lines to
the French and Norwegian resis-
tance forces. He worked his way
William E. Colby
up through the ranks, including a
posting as chief of the Far East
Division. In 1968, he was named
ambassador to South Vietnam
and supervised the "pacifica-
tion" program during the Viet-
nam war.
While he directed the CIA from
1973 to 1976, the agency came
under sharp attack, culminating
in televised hearings before Con-
gressional committees. Colby
maintains he tried to strike a bal-
ance between the public's right to
know and essential secrets of in-
telligence operations.
For more information about the
event, call the Chamber office,
352-1303.
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