SPEECH BY E. HENRY KNOCHE DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AT THE HOMECOMING DINNER OF WASHINGTON & JEFFERSON COLLEGE WASHINGTON, PA 9 OCTOBER 1976

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00901R000600030003-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 15
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 18, 2005
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: October 9, 1976
• Content Type: SPEECH

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SPEECH BY
E. HENRY KNOCHE
DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
AT THE
HOMECOMING DINNER OF WASHINGTON & JEFFERSON COLLEGE
WASHINGTON, PA.
9 OCTOBER 1976
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I want to talk to you tonight about the world of
intelligence, particularly the world of CIA. Until
recently very little has been said publicly and not much has
been known by the American people about their intelligence
agencies. Unfortunately when most people think of in-
telligence and the CIA, they tend to think of glamorous
fictional characters like James Bond -- with exotic
foreign assignments, beautiful women, and messages passed
in the dark, Maxwell Smart and his shoe. They have all
seen flashy headlines and sensationalized stories about
the Agency in the newspapers, many of them completely
out of context and blown all out of proportion. Total
secrecy and silence have been the traditions of our
services over the years, but the new watch word of
American intelligence is accountability. Accountability
to the Presidency, accountability to the Congress,
accountability to the American people and accountability
to ourselves as professionals within the intelligence
community. And so traditions change -- and today we in
intelligence want the American people to understand what
intelligence is -- and what it is not, and to understand
what we think is its very vital role in ensuring our
nation's security. So tonight I want to talk with you
about the real role of intelligence as I have seen'it
for 23 years and the role the CIA plays in supporting
the policymakers in this government of ours.
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My own career exemplifies to some extent what: it's
like to be involved in the modern intelligence world.
When the President earlier this year nominated me to
this post as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence,
I had served in the Agency for 23 Years. Most of my
service had been deep within the organization, but as
an Assistant to Director, William Colby, I gained
valuable insight and experience during the Agency's
relationship with Congress and the investigations which
took place in 1975-76, and in another recent assignment
I served as Director George Bush's Associate Deputy to
the Intelligence Community, helping him to coordinate
the work of all intelligence agencies including those
of the military, the State Department and the CIA.
So, I come to you tonight not only as an enthusiastic
intelligence officer, but also as one who has had the ad-
vantage of seeing the many different aspects of the busi-
ness of intelligence. Now I have given you my credentials,
but don't let me snow you. Humility is not the trait
that goes with most Washington officials, I hope it goes
with me, but let me share with you a story and illustrate
the point. There were two men walking down a river bank
one day, and there was a log floating down in the middle
of the river, covered with ants, and the one gent said
to the other, you know that log reminds me of Washington.
The guy said how so, and he said, well, every one of those
ants thinks he is steering that log.
In the world of today -- and in that of tomorrow --
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our country cannot afford to be blind or deaf to the
preparations of potential enemies. Our government needs
solid facts and judgments on which to base its policies
and the plans if our country is to remain strong and
free. And make no mistake about it: every nation. on
this planet, whether strong or not, whether free or not,
uses intelligence information to improve its position.
And this has always been so. The Bible in Joshua II
shows that Joshua, before attacking Jerrico to make the
walls fall down, sent two spies secretly into the city
to take stock of the internal strength in the city, to
make a judgment as to whether it was weak or strong.
Those spies had a tough mission, they were in enemy
territory and in the best traditions in intelligence
they were taken in by the great hand of a harlot who
gave them safe haven, protecting them from the king,
misled the king as to their whereabouts and eventually
let them complete their mission without one (unintelli-
gible) remains. I might say that this biblical story
which you will find in Joshua II leads to the con-
clusion that intelligence is the world's second oldest
profession.
Later on, in the origins of our country, George
Washington was a great devotee of intelligence. The
great importance he attached to it was reflected in a
letter he wrote about 200 years ago to Col. Elias Dayton,
who was Chief of American Intelligence, and Washington
emphasized to Dayton in that letter the importance of
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intelligence, in assessing the enemy or the British
situation, and he impressed upon Dayton the need for
secrecy, saying that for the lack of secrecy failure
is spelled in most occasions of this kind. That is the
father of our country talking.
What is intelligence then? Is it just a collection
of facts? Is it a single report from a secret agent
in a foreign land? Is it a fact from an encyclopedia
or a piece of information pried out of an old book in
the Library of Congress? Actually, any or all of these
may be part of intelligence. But there is a major
part which gets little publicity. The unsung part. is
the evaluation or the analysis -- by studious and in-
formed professionals of a great many pieces of information.
Our CIA analysts gather as many facts as they can
find both from open, unclassified sources, and reports
people collect from abroad through clandestine means.
They add a healthy dash of their own wisdom, judgment
from their own academic background experience, skills,
and then turn out what we call intelligence judgments
or assessments. These we produce as objectively as we
can without fear or favor. They are not altered to suit
government policy. We call situations as we see them,
regardless of whether our political leaders will find
the judgments to be good news or bad.
Who are the people in CIA who make these difficult
and important assessments about foreign situations?
Well, they are social scientists, historians, and experts
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in international relations. They are economists, engineers,
linguists, mathematicians, specialists in physical and
life sciences, people from a variety of disciplines,
who have chosen to make a career in government, specifically
in intelligence analysis.
The Agency can staff a small university from its
corps of analysts. Thirty percent of our specialists
have earned a Doctorate. Approximately fifty percent
of professional applicants selected for employment last
year had graduate degrees. Among Bachelor Degree holders,
cum laude and magna cum laude awards are common.
To support our analysts, CIA has a library whose
catalogue includes 81,000 titles, all of them incidentally
non-fiction. We add an average of 4,200 new titles every
year. The library subscribes to 1,600 newspapers and
periodicals, covering a vast array of technical fields,
and printed in a variety of languages. Incidentally, CIA
employees can read or converse with ease in 46 foreign
languages. We have instructors in 22 languages on our pay-
roll, and we send employees to other government and private
institutions to learn the rest.
So, to a great extent, CIA is like a university, a
community of scholars and specialists, studying past,
current and future problems and reaching conclusions
about them. Our analysts must be advised of everything
that can be learned or deduced about impending foreign
developments that affect this country. This is a process
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which requires personnel of the greatest scholorship,
dedication and integrity.
How did we get to the Central Intelligence Agency
of today? It was Pearl Harbor that dramatically focused
American attention on the need for a unified national in-
telligence service. Before World War II, we had what
could be called departmental intelligence. The War
Department had military intelligence, the Navy Department
its naval intelligence, and the Department of State pro-
duced, what amounted to diplomatic intelligence, but in
the terminology of today's kids no one was getting it
all together.
After the war it was clear the United States was
going to continue to need information and intelligence
on developments abroad, and there was a need for a
central organization to ensure that we were never again
caught by surprise as at Pearl Harbor. So President
Truman signed into law the National Security Act of
1947 creating the CIA to correlate and analyze all of the
governments information concerning foreign developments.
Years later, in 1964, I personally had the occasion to
visit President Truman in his offices in Independence,
Missouri. He reminisced about his role in creating CIA,
and in his inimitable manner he told me: "The State De-
partment and the military services separately had bits of
information I couldn't get my hands on, and I needed an
Agency that could put the pieces together and tell me
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what was going on. It was that simple. So, I set: up
the CIA.
All of you, I am sure, are aware of the battering
our Agency has taken in the past year to eighteen months.
We were charged with nearly every offense imaginable, from
"massive" domestic spying to being unable to warn our
nation of impending attack.
If you can imagine it, some individuals even made
headlines by claiming first-hand knowledge that the CIA
once captured three beings from outer space who had come
on a peaceful mission. According to the story we were
opposed to peace, we captured them, put them in a freezer
to make them talk and they died instead. Another claim
to make the newspapers was that we had found and pilfered
the remains of Noah's Ark on a mountain side in Turkey, and
that the artifacts are some where in the basement of our
headquarters in the Virginia countryside to this day.
All too often only the accusations and the allegations
make the headlines. The denial and the truth of the
matter never seem to be heard. After all, someone's claim
that we captured three beings from outer space or that we
found Noah's Ark may make a good story. But how many
readers would be fascinated by the fact that we didn't
do either. It would be something like a report that the
Second National Bank was not robbed today.
I hope that the American people never come to believe
unfounded allegations simply because they have appeared in
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That sort of technique works in closed societies. We
must not allow it to happen here.
I may be biased -- being a long-time CIA pro-
fessional. I'm proud of the service but I want you. good
people to know and share my pride in the men and women
in CIA who -- throughout the battering -- never flagged
in their dedication and professionalism. The President
and his advisors continued to be well-served by CIA in-
formation and judgments pertaining to the international
scene throughout the ordeal.
Sure, it was not pleasant as a CIA officer to sit
before the family television or at the breakfast table
with the morning paper -- seeing one's children troubled
by charges implying that father or mother somehow was
perhaps less than an upstanding American, or worse,
making a living in some thoroughly disreputable business.
But there is mettle and back-bone to these people and
their families. And I can tell you tonight that our
professionalism, our dedication, and our patriotism have
not been diminished by the ordeal.
Many responsible people have said that the old ways
of secrecy were used simply to cover abuses. Let me make
this statement loud and clear: we do not condone abuses.
We will not cal:1 upon secrecy to hide failures or wrongs
in our past simply to cover embarrassment or something that
was done in a wrong end and turned away. As a matter of
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fact, it was CIA, we in CIA, who uncovered the questionable
activities of the past that made the headlines during the
investigations. And we made corrections internally
three years ago -- long before the investigations ever
got under way.
Any bureaucratic organization needs a special look
and some reforms after such a length of time. In the
main the Presidential and Congressional reviews that
took place in 1975 and 1976 have reflected the American
process at work. Checks and balances in operation and
we in CIA are no doubt the better for it. America's
intelligence service must be responsible. But America's
treatment of that service and its necessary secrets
must also be responsible. Senseless exposure of true
intelligence secrets can cause great damage.
It is time for you as Americans to ask yourselves
whether it is in your interests, America's interests, to
expose intelligence secrets and activities that are
valid, even critically important and that have nothing
to do with abuses.
Let me try to explain briefly why secrecy is so
important in intelligence work. To get information
about the state of the world, we rely heavily on open,
unclassified information; newspapers, magazines, technical
journals, books, radio and television broadcasts and the
like. But this doesn't give us all we need to know about
foreign capabilities and intentions that are kept secret
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by foreign governments. So we must use clandestine
means to try to collect foreign secrets. And we rely
increasingly on advanced technology to help us acquire
information.
In the intelligence profession and in the law,
these are known. as intelligence sources and methods.
If our sources and methods are revealed, our adversaries
can take steps to keep us from getting the information
we need. This has nothing to do with keeping the
American public in the dark, a charge made by some
of our critics. It is a simple matter of protecting
our ability to get information. This is a responsibility
recognized in law. The Director of Central Intelligence,
by Federal statute, is charged with protecting in-
telligence sources and methods from disclosure.
True, the revelation of intelligence secrets
makes exciting reading. A few readers in this country
may ask themselves what the point of such a disclosure
could be aside from providing a few minutes worth of
interesting reading over the morning cup of coffee.
But most readers in this country, will soon forget what
the story was all about. Will our adversaries forget?
I assure you they will not. And then as a result,
enormously complex and expensive technical intelligence
collection systems can be countered and our sources need
to dry out. Dedicated and courageous men and women who
risk their lives on the front lines in foreign fields,
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in the service of their country seeking vital information
can be exposed and destroyed in this process. I don't
think the American people want that to happen, especially
when our adversaries, dedicated to the proposition that
we eventually must be defeated, are hard at work, day
and night.
Some of the charges against the intelligence
community are particularly upsetting to me as a professional.
You have heard a lot about intelligence failures. You
have been told that the American taxpayer is not getting
his money's worth for his intelligence dollar. You have
been told that American intelligence cannot warn of
imminent attack. That just plain isn't true. America
has good intelligence. America is safe from sneak
attack. And the intelligence record is studied with
successes. We spotted the Soviet nuclear missiles
being delivered to Cuba in 1962 and worked with the
President and his advisors in getting those executed.
American intelligence gave seven years warning on the
development of the Moscow anti-ballistic missile system.
We knew the status and design of two Soviet aircraft
carriers well before the first one put to sea and in
addition to these successes relatEd to military develop-
ments, we successfully monitor and predict trends in oil
prices and the flow of petrodollars; and world crop
prospects things that affect your pocketbook. We warned
last year of the imminent danger of war between two nations
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friendly to the U.S., and caused quitea diplomacy
to take place which prevented that war from breaking out.
As a matter of fact, it is the very effective state of
American intelligence that permits the strategic arms
limitation agreement to have been struck by the Soviet
Union. You may have your opinion as to what whether
those treaty agreements are worthy or worthless but
the fact is that intelligence can monitor the per-
formance of the other side in meeting the terms of those
agreements. So in the mean time, I am trying to describe
activity which is peace perserving not war provoking.
Now we don't have a crystal ball and we don't pretend to
be entirely accurate in predicting the future, particularly
when foreign leaders of the governments haven't made up
their minds about what they want their future to be. And
we cannot give you the precise day or hour of a particular
coup or revolution in more than the local weather man can
predict whether it is going to rain at precisely 9 o'clock
tomorrow morning. But precise prediction are not the main
mission of intelligence. Our main job is to give this
country's leaders the deepest possible understanding of
the military, political, social, and economic climate
abroad where vital American interests are at stake.
Our mission is to see to it that our leaders know
what is happening in the world beyond our borders and
about the forces and factors at work there. We must
alert our leaders to what may happen tomorrow. This
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combination of informing and alerting is what in-
telligence really is all about.
Ladies and gentlemen, we do it well. And we must
continue to do it well. We must know and understand
the problems that lie ahead, so that we can give sound
advice to those whose job it is to develop intelligent
policies to deal with those problems.
Our country faces tough problems around the world;
overpopulation and underproduction, the growing gaps,
and rising tensions between the have and have not countries,
nuclear proliferation, international terrorism, the
international narcotics trade, exploitation of the riches
of the seas and what that does to diplomatic and political
relationships. We must have systematic knowledge of
these complex subjects and an understanding of the in-
tentions of other nations. To do our job well we must
have also the understanding and support of you the
American people. We are, all of us, committed to the
same goal: making sure that America in the Tricentennial
continues to be strong and free, democratic, and dedicated
to the preserving of peace. We have every confidence
this will be so, and we: in CIA will do our share.
I would like to conclude with the words of an
ancient wise man -- General Sun Tzu, a supreme military
strategist in China long before Christ was born. Sun Tzu
wrote these words:
"For to win 100 victories in 100 battles is not the
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acme of skill. To find security without fighting is
the acme of skill. And therefore the unit that in ad-
vancing does not seek mere fame, and in withdrawing is
not concerned with avoiding blame, but whose only purpose
is to protect the people and promote the best interests
of the state. That unit is the precious jewel of the
State."
May the Central Intelligence Agency so conduct
itself, ladies and gentlemen, as to be just such a jewel
of the state.
Thank you for allowing me to be with you tonight.
I enjoyed it.
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