REMARKS BY R. JAMES WOOLSEY DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AT THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION DISTINGUISHED SPEAKERS PROGRAM

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP97M00518R000600780003-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 28
• Document Creation Date: December 27, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 28, 2011
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: March 11, 1993
• Content Type: MISC

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DATE
TRANSMITTAL SLIP
6 April
TO:
Debbie
ROOM NO.
BUILDING
REMARKS:
Attached are clean copies of
the Director's speech and
Q$As for your records.
THANKS
FROM:
PAI
ROOM NO.
BUILDING
EXTENSION
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Remarks By
R. James Woolsey
Director of Central Intelligence
At The
Smithsonian Institution
Distinguished Speakers Program
11 March 1993
"The End of the Cold War: Where Do We Go from Here?"
Having been a Regent of the Smithsonian
Institution, it gives me a special pride to appear at
the Resident Associate Distinguished Speakers Program.
I'm told that this is the first Smithsonian sponsored
meeting here at CIA Headquarters, and I think your
presence here tonight helps to underscore the
importance this Agency attaches to being as open as we
possibly can about the work that we do.
Last December, we dedicated a new and important
monument right here at CIA. It's a plain monument --
it has a simple concrete base that holds three erect
sections of the Berlin Wall. I'm told that these
three slabs of reinforced concrete were removed from
an area right near the Brandenberg Gate in the wake of
the peaceful revolutions which swept communist
governments from power in Europe.
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For members of the CIA and the intelligence
family, this monument is much more than concrete and
steel, it represents an important part of CIA history.
In 1961, as the wall was being built, we were
beginning to occupy this Headquarters building, CIA
under Allen Dulles then. And for the next 29 years
much of the Agency's work was devoted to breaking down
the barriers to peace and freedom created by the Cold
War and that were symbolized by the Wall.
Now that the Cold War is over and a portion of
the Wall rests at the foot of our building, some have
wondered, to paraphrase the title of this speech,
"What's Next For The CIA?"
Some of the Agency's critics and critics of the
Intelligence Community in general complain that the
CIA and the Community are stuck in some sort of Cold
War rut -- unable to move forward because of a mindset
mired in the past. I hope_ to _s_uggest to you,tonight
some reasons why I don't believe that is true.
But before I talk to you about how we are
changing and evolving to meet the future challenges to
the United States, to our friends and allies, I want
to reflect just.a bit on how our past has prepared
America's intelligence services to meet the future.
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When people think of CIA, they think of
surreptitious meetings and secret spy swaps at
midnight across the Glienecke Bridge in Berlin or
checkpoint Charlie. But while much of the mythology
about CIA has to do with clandestine operations, the
history of American intelligence is just as firmly
rooted in the traditions of academia -- of painstaking
research and objective analysis.
Bill Donovan, the father of modern American
intelligence, realized that merely collecting
information at that time from spies -- or from any
other source -- was not enough. The information had
to be analyzed, placed in proper context and most
importantly, the finished intelligence product had to
be timely -- a lesson that was made painfully clear at
Pearl Harbor. The failure of intelligence warning at
Pearl Harbor was in fact the central event which lead
to the establishment of the CIA really right before
the full beginning of the Cold War with reason for and
the genesis of the institution dates from the
understanding of what happened on December 7, 1941,
not really from the post war years. So in creating a
central intelligence organization after the war,
Donovan enlisted the support of noted Harvard
historian William Langer, Sherman Kent from Yale and
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others, who together built a strong tradition of
scholarship in intelligence.
Building on this tradition of scholarship, and
over the last 46-years the CIA's accumulated a wealth
of knowledge and developed unique insights into
different peoples, languages, cultures, economies of
countries in all corners of the globe -- formation
that has relevance today.
In earlier years the Agency and the Intelligence
Community were (of course) concerned that
underdeveloped and unstable countries would be
susceptible to communist influence. Today, many of
these same countries are still unstable, threatened by
fanatics, or facing humanitarian crises that not only
endanger their sovereignty but also challenge regional
stability. We had to understand how sophisticated
weapons technologies could influence the outcome of
war -- also the same technologies that some unfriendly
third countries now seek to acquire to threaten their
neighbors.
In many other areas -- from understanding the
Soviet economy, to defense conversion, from the
problems of Soviet oil production to understanding the
many important religious and ethnic rivalries in
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what's now the former Soviet Union -- our knowledge,
gained from decades of careful study and research, can
be now put into a broader context, important for
understanding today's issues. Our country's leaders
-- both civilian and military -- rely on this huge
reservoir of knowledge. They count on our analysis of
global events, and they look to us for judgments that
are not only sound, but objective and fair.
But yet, while we focused on Cold War issues the
CIA and the Intelligence Community in the United
States never wholly consumed by them. We had experts
looking at everything from the stability of major
foreign currencies to water resources in the Middle
East. On economic issues, our analysts monitored both
the international economy -- trade, finance, economic
competition -- and the domestic performance of
countries around the world. We had -- and continue to
have -- recognized authorities on international
monetary affairs, advanced-technology developments,
the inner workings of regional economic groupings, and
many other economic issues of direct interest today.
We've learned from our past and we are using that
knowledge as a springboard to the future.
Make no mistake about it. The world has changed
in fundamental ways and is still changing in
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fundamental ways. In his inaugural address just a
couple of months ago, President Clinton said that,
"today, as the old order passes, the new world is more
free, but less stable. Communism's collapse has
called forth old animosities and new dangers." Les
Aspin said in his swearing in ceremony the other day
quite succinctly, "we all rather wish that the new
world order were not so long on new and so short on
order."
Of the many issues that have come to the
forefront in recent years, few have more serious and
far-reaching implications for global and regional
security and stability than the proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction and of the means,
particularly ballistic missiles to carry them.
Weapons proliferation poses one of the most complex
challenges that the Intelligence Community or any
Intelligence Community has ever faced and it will pose
such a challenge for the remainder of the century, and
no doubt, beyond that.
Today, over two dozen countries are seeking
advanced weapons, including nuclear, chemical, and
biological, as well as the missiles to deliver them.
Our job is getting more difficult, because as
international awareness of the problem increases,
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countries and their suppliers are becoming more clever
in devising networks of front companies to frustrate
export controls and to buy what would otherwise be
prohibited to them. I said in my confirmation
hearings that it is as if we have been struggling with
a large dragon for some nearly half a century that
we've finally slain it and we found ourselves in the
midst of a jungle full of a large number of very well
camouflaged and very poisonous snakes. In many ways
the dragon was indeed much easier to keep track of.
The challenge we face in controlling
proliferation is multifaceted: we have to decipher
and untangle the complex web of suppliers, middlemen,
and end users of weapons of mass destruction and
ballistic missiles; we have to distinguish between
legitimate and illicit purposes of much of the dual-
use equipment and we have to help interdict the flow
of material, technology, and know-how to potential
proliferatoxs. This interdiction and this sort of
work requires very close cooperation between technical
intelligence collection, human collection and those
who can take action for the United States whether its
diplomatically or otherwise.
The Middle East represents an area of special
concern, because half of the countries have nuclear,
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chemical or biological weapons programs, at least in
development.
Iran, for example, has embarked on an ambitious
across-the-board program to develop its military and
defense industries -- and this includes their weapons
of mass destruction programs. Tehran is shopping in
Western markets for nuclear and missile technology and
is trying to lure back technical experts Iranian
experts that it drove abroad in the 1980s. Because it
has not been able to get what it wants from the West,
it has turned to Asian sources; Iran's principal
suppliers of just these weapons and this technology
today since their war with Iraq have come to be North
Korea and China.
Iran has an active chemical weapons program and
it makes no bones about its right to chemical weapons
-- especially in light of Iraq's use of chemical
weapons against it. Iran has.produced at least
several hundred tons of blister, choking and blood
agents -- possibly as much as 2,000 tons -- and they
have done so at a steadily increasing rate since 1984.
Iran's behavior in rearming and rebuilding its
military and developing a strategic capability is
ominously analogous to Iraq's action in the 1980s --
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and could pose a very grave threat to regional
stability in that very important part of the world.
The development of an Iranian nuclear capability would
not only dramatically alter the regional power balance
but probably trigger an even greater arms race or
worse.
The Middle East is an area in which our core
strategic interests are engaged. Access to oil at
market- and (not at politically-) determined prices is
vital to the world's economic health. And as we
learned during the Gulf War, it matters who controls
this vital resource. Israel's security is an abiding
concern, and it's one that's complicated by our wider
interests in the region.
But these strategic concerns can't be viewed in
isolation. They're caught up in a vortex of growing
regional tension and instability into which we are
increasingly drawn. Even . uur .definition of what
defines the Middle East is changing: the large and
potentially unstable states of Central Asia, with
their ties to neighboring Muslim states, are now part
of this region. Tired authoritarian regimes
identified with failed nationalist and socialist
ideologies are being challenged from below by their
exploding and economically desperate populations.
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Some in the Middle East are drawn to a radical brand
of politicized Islam which draws on deep-seated anti-
Western feeling. Frustration and a sense of
powerlessness give rise to terrorism and put some of
our friends in the region and as we saw in New York
not long ago, perhaps we ourselves at risk.
Thus, the transfer and introduction of important
and new weapons technology has an incendiary effect on
the stability of the Middle East and of Central and
Southwest Asia. And the Intelligence Community is on
the look-out very vigorously for systems and
technologies that have the potential to alter the
balance of power in that part of the world.
We are also paying careful attention to Research
& Development and trends in technology that could
affect the United States' security. For example,
semiconductors under development promise to
revolutionize segments of .the .electronics industry --
and they will likely lead to a new generation of smart
weapons distributed far more broadly 'in the world an
assortment that were used with such devastating effect
by we ourselves in the Persian Gulf.
The CIA and the Intelligence Community are not
just focused on weapons technology, many other areas
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new technologies contribute also to the complexity of
the issues and problems that the United States and the
West in general face. In the financial marketplace
for example, rapid communications are bringing
countries, organizations and individuals closer
together. Sophisticated computer networks move
literally billions of dollars across international
borders instantaneously. This has fueled a huge
increase in world trade and has led to greater
economic prosperity for many countries. But those
same financial networks are being used with increasing
frequency by drug kingpins and organized crime
syndicates -- groups that now have a vehicle for
moving laundered money quickly among a variety of
front companies. This of course, complicates our job
-- trying to unravel the complex trail of illegal drug
transactions. It also makes more difficult the job of
our partners in law enforcement such as the FBI, who
seek to prosecute investigate and then prosecute those
responsible-for the flow of illegal drugs into the
United States.
All of us have had terrorism on our mind
recently, of course. The tragic bombing at the World
Trade Center in New York and the deadly attack on CIA
employees just outside the gates reminded us that the
world -- including at times the United States -- is a
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dangerous place. While we hope we are not now
beginning a new chapter for terrorism, we have the
organization I hope and believe that is designed and
oriented to meet the challenge. CIA and the
Intelligence Community -- through the Counterterrorist
Center that we operate -- are working closely with law
enforcement on these two particular cases and around
the world a wide range of terrorist issues with
friends and allies in many countries. We are looking
at all the angles -- including the possibility in
these two cases of international involvement. While
this investigation, these investigations are on-going,
people at the CIA are working hard -- checking our
sources, following up on leads, using the knowledge of
people and organizations, and making judgments about
who would be capable of performing these acts.
Feeding the results of these investigations to our
domestic partners who are the lead Agencies such as
the FBI.
Weapons proliferation, narcotics, terrorism,
understanding the dynamic interaction of forces such
as religious and ethnic strife -- it's clear that we
have a pressing set of intelligence priorities on our
plate. But we also, however, have been shifting our
resources in ways that not only accommodate, but
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anticipate new issues that are important to our
policymakers.
For example, leaders in the United States are
increasingly asking CIA to study environmental issues
because we have special skills, special resources, and
unique insights.
Last November, we brought in a group of well
known and highly respected environmental scientists
here to the CIA. After giving them the appropriate
clearances, we briefed them on the technical
capabilities of some of our most closely held
intelligence collection systems. The scientists were
then offered the opportunity to review what we
collected. All of this was done with an eye toward
determining if intelligence can help answer some of
the most pressing environmental issues of our time --
ozone depletion, the effect of the diminishing rain
forests, and global warming. .We, of course, have the
only systematically collected pictures of the
depredations of the environment over the course of the
last quarter century in the Eurasian land mass in
particular.
It may surprise some of you to know that we have
been looking at environmental issues for this long
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time even consciously and intentionally. CIA has
monitored Soviet handling of nuclear waste since 1948,
when the reactor that produced the plutonium for the
first Soviet nuclear weapon began operation. We now
look at environmental contamination due to a variety
of nuclear activities -- most of which on the other
side of the Earth supported weapons production -- and
questions about the safety of stored but radioactive
liquid and solid waste. This includes reprocessing of
fuel from civilian and naval reactors, in the Soviet
Union and elsewhere and naval nuclear activities.
Since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, CIA experts
have worked closely with other US government agencies
to prepare detailed studies of Soviet-designed power
reactors there and in Eastern Europe. And we are now
working with these agencies and with the Russians,
Ukrainians, and Eastern Europeans themselves to
determine the most effective way to improve the safety
of such reactors. -- -
Just as narcotics was considered a nontraditional
intelligence topic ten years ago, today other issues
-- such as the global impact of the AIDS epidemic --
have assumed greater importance for intelligence. We
began to focus on the AIDS epidemic and its effects in
the mid-1980s. The Intelligence Community's role is
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not to study the medical aspects of the AIDS virus
itself, of course but to collect and analyze
information on the impact of AIDS on peoples of
foreign countries -- and their leaders -- and on the
responses of foreign governments to the epidemic which
is a major and disastrous trend and development, of
course, in many parts of Africa but also in some other
parts of the world.
Today, I've identified just a few of the issues
of concern to us. I haven't mentioned for instance,
the detailed intelligence support that we provide our
military in humanitarian efforts such as we saw in
northern Iraq, in Somalia and most recently, in the
airdrop of food to the Bosnians. I haven't mentioned
our support to arms control negotiations, which I was
the beneficiary of for a number of years as Arms
Control Negotiator, reports and background briefings
we provide to the President and to Congress on
countless topics, or the whole host of other tasks for
which we are responsible.
It is clear that in dealing with the aftershocks
of the fall of communism and all of the new issues,
that we in the Intelligence Community cannot handle
tomorrow's problems using yesterday's solutions. We
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have to continue to reinvent ourselves almost on a
daily basis.
But of all the challenges that the Intelligence
Community faces, perhaps our most difficult assignment
in the coming years is going to be to provide an
expanding level of service within a contracting
envelope of resources. We take seriously our
responsibilities as do the other parts of the
Government in doing things efficiently and effectively
in making a contribution in the reduction of the
Federal deficit.
In the coming years, CIA and the Intelligence
Community will be reducing personnel by about 17 and a
half percent over the course of the next four years.
This essentially means we will be reducing at just
about the rate people retire. Leaving almost no room
for new hiring. We face this prospect knowing full
well that, .as other defense organizations scale back,
there is going to be an extraordinarily greater
emphasis placed on intelligence to provide warning in
international crises in order to help a smaller
military get ready to take actin and also to serve as
a force multipliers, as the phrase goes, for the
military forces as intelligence did very effectively
in the Gulf.
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We will meet this challenge by revising
collection priorities, by refocusing our technical
collection systems, such as reconnaissance satellites
-- by learning what we can do, with what we will have
and what we can live without. We know that more
emphasis has to be placed on intelligence collection,
new and innovative ways and we have to slim down and
have what the military calls a better tooth-to-tail
ratio. This means that our people will in some areas,
need to be retrained; it means that the intelligence
community will need to rely more heavily on artificial
intelligence and expert systems and on a whole range
of new technologies to help us sort through this
expanding range of information. But most of all, it
means that we will all have to be very flexible -- in
the way we use collection systems human intelligence,
signals intelligence and reconnaissance -- and we have
to be more creative in our approach to new problems.
As we work to reinvent-the-Intelligence Community
ourselves, we know there is a set of core
responsibilities that will never change. Intelligence
is and will remain the eyes and ears of the United
States -- not just for warning our leaders of
impending crises, but in providing information,
insight and a context from which leaders, the
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President and others, can make informed foreign policy
choices.
I've barely scratched the surface of the wide
array of issues that confront American intelligence
and I'd like to leave the rest of the time -- the bulk
of the time for questions. While the topics are many,
the history and traditions of American intelligence --
the traditions of scholarship, unique insights,
effective collection and timely analysis -- provide a
fine guide for meeting the challenges of the future.
American intelligence is focused on the important
issues of today -- issues that represent barriers to
peace and freedom for all of us and for our friends
and allies. And, like the Berlin Wall, these
barriers, I have confidence, too will someday come
down.
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QUESTION AND ANSWERS
We can go given how fast cars can move and so forth until a
little after seven here. So let's go ahead with questions,
anybody, I think we have microphones in the audience... down
front. Please wait for the microphones so that you can be heard
by everybody in the auditorium.
Q: I've heard you speak before Congress twice now and you stated
your opposition to releasing the overall intelligence budget
figure.
Q: Given the fact that it's widely reported in the news media
and that the people you might not want to know about it are
getting some indication anyway and you want to be more open as
this seminar shows, I still don't fully understand why you are
opposed to this especially when Bob Gates when he was confirmed
said that he saw no problem with doing this?
A: Good question. The Administration has not yet made a
decision on whether to release, if one can find one, a single
total for the intelligence budget. And whatever is decided we,
of course, in the Intelligence Community will live with. What I
said when asked about this in the two times I've testified in
public on the Hill, is that there are some good arguments against
it, and let me tell you what I think they are. There is no
single reasonable figure. There are normally two totals that are
mentioned. One, or what's called the National Foreign
Intelligence Program, is the Intelligence Community somewhat
narrowly defined. The other is for the National Foreign
Intelligence Program, plus tactical intelligence in the
Department of Defense, which adds considerably more money and is
a larger figure. These numbers are of course known, as are all
of the subordinate numbers and supporting numbers, to the
Intelligence Committees who deal with the intelligence budget in
the Congress, and they are known to all Congressmen and Senators.
This is one reason that they, or_something close, appear from
time to time in the press. They are available for debate in
Executive sessions in the Senate or the House and they are
available for, of course, debate in the Oversight Committees and
the Appropriations Committees. The reason I think there is a
very good case for those debates being held in either Executive
session in either body or in the Committees themselves which also
operate in Executive session, is that any discussion of why one
would want to increase or decrease those numbers immediately runs
into the issue of what does that money go for. It is impossible
to offer an argument either to make an arbitrary cut or to make
an arbitrary increase without discussing substance. And if one
discusses substance, one moves very quickly into disclosing what
the components are and what different amounts of money are going
for and why some may be more important than others and what over
time has the change been, in say spending for reconnaissance
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satellites or spending for the covert HUMINT collection, human
intelligence collection for the CIA. It is that debate being
conducted in public that creates a serious problem, at least I
think, and many people associated with intelligence budget issues
in the past think, because it tends to reveal sources and methods
in intelligence. One of the primary responsibilities of the
Director of Central Intelligence under the 1947 National Security
Act is to protect sources and methods. It is, in fact, the case
that much of what we know today from either signals intelligence,
human intelligence or reconnaissance comes from a very limited,
sometimes single source. Furthermore, they are sources that, if
the substance of what one knows is not described in a very
general way, can lead to the disclosure of where something comes
from. If it comes from signals intelligence, the source can be
turned off very easily by anyone who suspects. If it comes from
human intelligence, it can lead to Agents--people who help the
United States in the West, some of them very courageously and
some of them today resident in some very ugly countries, let's
say they have very ugly governments. In many cases, of course,
killed. So trying to avoid carrying on the argument about how
much is this worth and how much is that not worth, what is this
for and what is that not for, in public is something that I think
you'll find anybody who holds this job being very skeptical of.
We carry on these arguments and discussions very fully now before
our Oversight Committees and indeed derivatively before the House
and Senate as a whole. Bob Gates, shortly before he left this
office, actually gave a speech up in Boston calling for more
involvement by the Congressional Committees in Oversight, and I
said it's a view that I share. But, although we would try, of
course, to live with a regime in which the budget or subordinate
budgetary figures of the Intelligence Community are a matter of
public disclosure, of course, when we disclose them publicly, we
are not just disclosing them to you, we are disclosing them
around the world and therefore to the people we are worried about
learning them. Although we would live with that, I feel a
certain obligation to present the arguments on the other side and
I have done so in Congressional testimony, as I just have here
tonight.
Q: Do you think that the present organization of the
Intelligence Community is suitable for the challenges of the new
world order that you laid out, or do you agree to some extent
with the ideas for restructuring that have been put forward?
A: I testified on the restructuring plans presented by the
Senate and House Intelligence Committees a couple of years ago,
that were debated as recently as last year in the Congress, and
supported some aspects of the reorganization. Two main ones that
I think were particularly important were approved by the
Congress, although the wholesale reorganization was not. One
that was approved was the establishment of something called
Central Imagery Office, which is essentially an office that
probably in time will grow to be a small Agency. It would be
responsible for doing the architecture and coordinating all of
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the collection and dissemination of imagery for intelligence
purposes. It would do similar things to what the National
Security Agency does for signals intelligence. This is, I think,
important because whereas signals intelligence was used very
effectively and very quickly during the Gulf.War by our military
forces, imagery was not used quite so quickly and so effectively.
And part of the problem was that there was no central
organization and architecture for how you collect imagery from
all sorts of different things--satellites, aircraft, so forth--
put it into the military pipeline in a way that can be fed out,
and used quickly and effectively by a division commander. That
process is complicated; it is important. Today some aspects of
it had some of the same problems that you will remember from the
description of the command in control links in the military back
at the time of the invasion of Grenada, in which Army radios
couldn't talk to Navy radios. And I think one military officer
on Grenada placed a credit card phone call back to Norfolk in
order to get through to the ship, and so forth. It's not quite
that bad, but there are some disconnects, and the establishment
of the Central Imagery Office, I think, will help alot. The
other thing that I thought was important even before I testified
for and had this job, was that the Director of Central
Intelligence be given a substantial amount of reprogramming
authority for money and people within the whole Intelligence
Community rather than having to go and simply advance a
suggestion to the various parts of the Community. But the rest
of those reorganization proposals were heavily driven by solving
a problem that I think now is more or less over and done with.
They sought to separate intelligence operations, particularly
human collection and the clandestine services, or the Directorate
of Operations here, from analysis--to put it in a completely
different organization from intelligence analysis. The idea was
to avoid corrupting the analysts by having some kind of a covert
action or policy program that was going on which would lead them
to think they had to support it. The way this mainly came up in
the public debates in mid-80's was, of course, in connection with
Nicaragua. If one was operating a clandestine covert action war,
would it be possible for people from the same Agency to do
analysis of the intelligence in the situation, and say for
example, the Contras were losing or whatever? That tension and
that difficulty was a problem in some cases. I don't think it
was particularly a bad one, but it was some kind of a problem in
the mid 1980's. In case no one has noticed, the mid 1980's are
gone. The Cold War is over. We don't have any of those types of
operations going on now. The problem now is that one wants to
get the people who are involved in human intelligence collection
working closely together with the analysts so that if what you
are trying to do is understand how to recruit an agent in some
particular country, let's say, that has a government that is
particularly inclined toward weapons dissemination and you're
only going to have access to this person for a very brief period
of time when he is outside that country travelling somewhere, you
want to be able to send the smartest person in this building, and
perhaps in the entire government with respect to how chemical
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weapons are constructed and how a chemical weapons laboratory
would work, to work closely together with the person who is
trying to recruit the agent. You want analysis and understanding
to, I think, be wedded up with collection operations. Especially
now in this new age where there are these types of problems and
we're facing such problems as weapons proliferation,
counternarcotics and so forth. So, I think that what we want to
do now and what we're trying to do here is to foster cooperation
between intelligence analysis and those who collect it, to have
things work together far more closely. I think that the proposal
that the two Committees made a few years ago was a reasonable
proposal. But I think now it's largely been overtaken by events.
And generally speaking, I don't think these very large changes in
intelligence organizations that they were talking about with that
in mind really are even needed or even in line at this point.
Q: As economics become more and more important what do you think
the role of the Agency is going to be in commercial industrial
intelligence?
A: I said something rather gently in my confirmation hearings
that was, I think, rather intentionally misrepresented overseas
by a couple of publications, particularly one in Germany and one
in Italy, and was somewhat confused by some press reports in this
country. Earlier this week, although it wasn't reported because
it wasn't new and fun and exciting, I said something to clarify
this in the open testimony before the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence, so let me reiterate here what I said
then. What I said originally was that economic intelligence is
an important issue. It covers a wide variety of subjects,
counterintelligence, economic trends around the globe, and so
forth. That industrial espionage being conducted by American
intelligence agencies on behalf of American corporations was-a
difficult subject that was fraught with problems, in both
international affairs and for law. But on issues as this whole
set of economic intelligence issues, including industrial
espionage, we were going to have a look at and review what had
been reviewed before in the government. That was the set of
remarks that got interpreted, at-least-in some circles, as
Woolsey wants to spy for American corporations. Let me say now
what I said earlier this week. Fraught means loaded; the field
or the idea of the United States collecting through its
intelligence agencies information from foreign corporations and
passing it on to American corporations to try to help American
companies understand what foreign companies are doing is loaded,
repeat loaded, with problems. Legal problems, foreign policy
problems of all kind. It has been reviewed three times to my
knowledge over the last quarter century in the US government.
The answers always come out the same; we're not going to do it.
I don't know anything in present writing that would suggest that
we're going to come out with a different answer when we review it
this time. But you need to understand, new Administrations come
in and we review everything. Now--full stop. That is a small
segment of the subject of economic intelligence. Economic
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intelligence broadly includes a lot of other things. It includes
understanding where oil production is going generally in the
world, what wheat crops are going to be like, what technology
trends are going to be like. Particularly, with respect to
issues like electronic systems that might have dual use, military
and non-military use. It includes understanding how sanctions
are working against Iraq and Serbia. It includes a whole range
of issues that the CIA and Intelligence Community in the United
States and other countries have looked at a long time in order to
help American government, American policymakers to make decisions
about what to do about various matters of foreign policy, and
international economic policy. There are two areas of economic
intelligence, and you might call it economic counterintelligence,
that have always been important but we've treated rather
gingerly. They are understanding what foreign intelligence
services are doing and how they do it when they conduct
industrial espionage against American corporations. And, it
includes understanding what the issues are and how it's done when
foreign countries, their governments, their intelligence
services, and foreign corporations together cooperate in bribing
other foreign governments in order to get contracts for their
companies and to deny American companies contracts for which they
have fairly competed. Those two subjects, foreign industrial
espionage against American companies and foreign efforts to bribe
their way into contracts that they can't win fairly in other
countries, have always been subjects of intelligence collection
by US intelligence communities. During the days of the Cold War,
since some of the countries that were doing this were friends and
indeed allies, some rather close allies of the United States, we
tended to be relatively nice when we found out about this. We
would pass it on to the Executive branch and the Executive branch
would, from time to time say something to a foreign government
that you shouldn't do that and sometimes they would say it very
sternly. But, our reaction was muted by the fact that we had the
main show going. The Cold War and what was really important
above all else was to keep the team together in the Cold War.
The Cold War is now over. I believe that work on you might call
counterintelligence work with respect to what foreign countries
are doing with both bribery and iidustrial espionage against
American corporations will be a high priority. And furthermore,
now in the aftermath of the Cold War, not only will we use some
ingenuity in trying to help the rest of the government figure how
to react strongly and firmly against those types of shenanigans
by other countries, I said in the hearings, that frankly, I
rather relish the opportunity to work out what we might do in
order to help protect American companies against that sort of
thing. That, I hope, puts the economic intelligence issue into
some context.
Q: A couple of weeks ago on t.v. there was an interview with
Michael Levine,the ex-undercover agent for the DEA. He stated
that a couple of years ago he was involved in an investigation in
Chiang Mai, Thailand against major'international traffickers, not
that you would be up-to-date on that or anything, but he said
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that eventually it was quashed because those traffickers were
being protected by the CIA. And I was wondering how you
addressed charges like that in general coming from somebody who
has so much credibility on the issue?
A: Well, first of all, I don't know the gentleman and I don't
know that he does have credibility. But, we'd look at it the way
we'd look at any other charge. We'd go out to the field and look
at people's records and interview people, and so forth, to see
whether it was true. And if it were true, why it were true and
look into it. I have no idea whether this has anything to it or
it's entirely fantasy. You must realize, and I'm not casting any
aspersions on this gentleman's charges, but you must realize that
a secret organization in a-free society is by virtue, of the way
it does business and has to do business, the focus of a lot of
paranoia. And, the most salient example of that was out here, of
course, on Route 123 on January 25. We have no idea what was
motivating Mr. Kansi, but there are lots of people in the United
States and around the world that are convinced that their lives
would have been simpler, and anything they wanted to do would
have gone smoothly and would not have been thwarted, if it had
just been that the CIA hadn't stopped them. And sometimes when
somebody has to put up with those charges, occasionally in the
past it has been true. And, the device for finding out about it
and getting it straight and keeping this organization from doing
things it shouldn't are a vigorous Inspector General and two very
vigorous Oversight Committees of the Congress from whom we have
no secrets--believe me.
Q: You mentioned the need to more carefully monitor dual-use
technologies. Could you comment a bit on the measures that you
think are necessary and what sort of cooperation would be
involved with State and Commerce and Defense who tend to
arbitrate and monitor those uses and export?
A: Well, we are the information collection system for them.
They make the policy determinations about whether something's
technology on the Commerce Department's list or the weapons list
mentioned by the State Departments munitions list; they make the
decision about what substantively can or cannot be exported from
the United States. We're the overseas eyes and ears. And our
job, really, is to ascertain what some of the technologies are
being used for when they are exported to other countries and to
make sure that State, Commerce, Defense--the substantive decision
makers--are informed about what uses things are being put to and
what they're capable of being put to in various countries. An
export of some type of equipment, for example, to a country that
did not have particularly high technology might really only have
a reasonable and legitimate civilian use, whereas an export of
that same equipment to Iraq or Iran, which have rather advanced
technical capabilities for the Mid East and really for many
areas--in some areas of the world, might be a subject of a good
deal more concern. So the job we're in is using reconnaissance,
human sources, and signals intelligence. to help put together an
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understanding of what things might be used for and what things
are dangerous and potentially useful, particularly for weapons
proliferation and then we step out of it. We're not a
decisionmaker and won't pretend to be.
Q: What can you tell us about Russia and Boris Yeltsin's
troubles and will he survive to make it to the summit next
month...
A: We all hope so. He's a brave and in many ways a very able
man. And, I think genuinely someone who is trying to do his best
to try and bring a democracy and an open economy to Russia. His
real problem is that he didn't take action when he had the first
opportunity, in the aftermath of the coup, to obtain some sort of
constitutional restructure of Russia which would give him the
possibility of working with a legislature, whatever its power,
that was not dominated by old Communist Party Apparatchik's. The
real problem is the Congress of People's Deputies, which under
this Stalinist era constitution has had these other things
layered into it. Is composed of about 85% of Communist
Apparatchiks from the old era because it was elected in 1990
before the Soviet Union broke up. And some of them had evolved
into being reasonable, at least halfway reasonable, on some
issues, but there is at least very hard core of something anyway.
One third and perhaps close to half of some issues, perhaps more
than half of the Congress of People's Deputies, that is quite
hostile to economic reform and to political democratization.
Just one example of how odd this all is, hyperinflation is a
major concern for Russia--something that we watch very closely
and because it can have extremely serious impacts on the whole
country's cohesion. The Russian economy is very close to
hyperinflation now which is typically defined as 30% inflation a
month. And the authority and responsibility for the central bank
in deciding how much money gets printed is essentially under that
constitution, something that the legislature has responsibility
for rather than the President, rather than being independent the
way, say, the Federal Reserve Board is here. And it is very
tough, I think, for President Yeltsin to operate in that kind of
environment. It's been in a way remarkable that he's done as
well as he has and the reform movement has carried on as long as
it has, has implemented so much privatization and so much change
in the lives of Russian's already. But its a dicey and uncertain
situation, one that troubles us a great deal and we watch very
carefully. I think anyone who makes a prediction to you, though,
about exactly what's going to happen from day to day is really
sticking his neck out more than anyone should. What we do is
watch it indicate the trends, indicate where the points of
differences may be and what factors are likely to guide
decisionmaking. But making a point prediction that "X" is going
to happen tomorrow or why tomorrow in Russia--I wouldn't do it--
somebody might. Let's see.
Q: One of the activities of the CIA during the Cold War was
subversion or the overthrowing of governments. Do you think with
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the end of the Cold War, the rationale for subversion has changed
and is this a capability that you think should be increased or
decreased with the end of the Cold War?
A: Well, the field of so-called covert action, which is a phrase
that's used in the statute now that regulates, includes a lot
more than trying to overthrow governments. In the past history
of the CIA it is only relatively rarely that, although from time
to time it has meant that. I don't see any reasonable
possibility in the near future that this Agency is going to be
involved in covert actions of any kind, that, if they were
disclosed, would be something that the American people as a whole
would be opposed to. We may well continue to be involved in
covert action, I think not of the sort you described, but covert
actions of various sorts, that have to be secret in order to be
effective. But the amount of that today is a very small share in
the CIA's budget. Way down from the period in the 1980's for
example, when they were operating the war in Afghanistan. Now,
subversion is a loaded word, but you might say that one thing the
CIA was involved in during the 1980's was subverting the Afghan
government. And subverting the government that was responsive to
Soviet rulers essentially of Afghanistan. It was expensive; on
the other hand, it played a major role in stopping the Soviet
Union's expansion and thwarting them in a way that helped lead to
the crumbling of the Soviet state. As Patrick Henry said about
treason, "if that be subversion--make the most of it."'
Q: How has the role of intelligence changed with the focus of
America as the international peacekeeping force especially in its
relationship to the United Nations?
A: It is in the process of beginning to evolve. It is a very
important question because in the aftermath of the Cold War, with
the United States being the world's only superpower now, it means
we have now the only remaining world-wide intelligence service.
There are some intelligence services that are very good and some,
one or two, that have some reach around the world. The KGB was
the only sort of world-wide competitor of us in terms of
intelligence collection and now the Russian intelligence service
(SVRR) is orienting toward somewhat different things and is not
operating in some parts of the world. So the United States
really is, not just the CIA, but the whole intelligence community
of the United States, is really the only worldwide intelligence
service now. It imposes a particular obligation, I think, on us
to look for ways in which we can do a good job of helping the
United Nations both in peacekeeping operations, which under
Chapter 6 of the Charter are operations which don't really
involve the use of force and are effectively the blue helmets on
the line between people who have already agreed to make peace.
And also under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, peacemaking or
enforcement operations to which under UN authority, one has to go
out and tangle with some bad folks, whether it's Saddam Hussein
or warlords in Somalia. The provision of intelligence to UN
forces was quite extensive in the Gulf War and I don't mean just
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to Americans. I mean the United States shared things like
satellite imagery with a lot of countries who were working
together and were trying to defeat a tyrant. We worked very
closely with several countries. We did certain things to keep
secret the details and the way that satellites work and the way
the reconnaissance is conducted. But in terms of the product, we
worked very closely with a number of countries from around the
world. We are working very closely with the UN force and not
just the American portion of it in Somalia. We will continue to
provide the logistics and command and control in intelligence
support for that force when it comes to be commanded shortly by a
Turkish General, and includes only American suppport elements,
not American combat forces. We have found it somewhat more
complex, but we still are able to do it in some ways to provide
certain types of intelligence to some of the peacekeeping
operations, that is Chapter 6, essentially the non-forceful ones.
And we are very much involved, and I think quite helpfully so, in
providing intelligence to UN organizations, such as the
International Atomic Energy Agency, in their efforts to
understand what is going on in places like Iraq and'North Korea,
and in that capacity, we work very hard to keep sources and
methods protected. But we are involved rather continually in
briefing those international agencies, and people from around the
world who serve in them, on what they need to do and what they
can learn from us and other countries as well, in doing a good
job with inspections and nuclear materials and the like. It's
growing a little bit like common law, kind of case-by-case. It's
not that there is some overarching new policy, but it's growing,
I think, rather perceptively and steadily. And as the United
Nations comes to be more and more important in enforcement to
peacekeeping actions around the world, I think this cooperation
by us and by some other countries, the UK and others that have
excellent intelligence services, is going to grow too.
Q: You had said that you were looking at possible foreign
involvement in the world trade center bombing. Are there any
indications of a state-sponsor of that bombing?
A: Not so far as we know. Not yet. But, we will, of course,
look for that. But as far as we know now, there is nothing on a
country being involved.
Q: ...a group though that you're looking at...that you suspect?
A: I don't want to go, at this point, beyond what I have said.
But your specific question was state-sponsored, and to this point
I can answer that. Well, I mean it was quite clear there was a
foreign individual who is not a citizen of the United States who
is involved and has fled to a foreign country. But I'm not
trying to suggest tonight nor anytime that we have any indication
that there is any state sponsorship involved in that.
Thank you.
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