MEET THE PRESS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00418R000100100029-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 12
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 21, 2012
• Sequence Number: 29
• Publication Date: June 29, 1975
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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MEET THE PRESS
Simettiodo goee.46 ronfewence SA,
aoduced tiy LAWRENCE E. SPIVAK
%at: WILLIAM E. COLBY
Director of Central Intelligence
VOLUME 19
SUNDAY, JUNE 29, 1975
NUMBER 26
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I V III 1111 11[1E1111V 1 111 II
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Rua THOMAS B. ROSS, Chicago Sun-Times
LESLIE H. GELB, The New York Times
JAMES J. KILPATRICK, Washington Star Syndicate
FORD 'ROWAN, NBC NEWS
diesiorator: LAWRENCE E. SPIVAK
Permission is hereby granted to news media and
magazines to reproduce in whole or in part. Credit
to NBC's MEET THE PRESS will be appreciated.
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MEET THE PRESS
MR. SPIVAK: Our guest today on MEET THE PRESS is the
Director of Central Intelligence, William E. Colby. Mr. Colby be-
gan his career as an intelligence officer with the OSS during
World War II. He later joined the CIA where he held a number
of major posts before becoming Director in September, 1973. We
will have the first questions now from Ford Rowan of NBC News.
MR. ROWAN: Mr. Colby, in May of 1973 the Inspector General
of the CIA compiled a report which showed illegal and improper
activities on the part of the CIA. You did not at that time inform
the White House or the Department of Justice; instead, you be-
gan the destruction of records, including several collections of
names which were part of the domestic surveillance program.
My first question is, on behalf of the agency, were you attempt-
ing to obstruct justice?
MR. COLBY: No, Mr. Rowan, I was not. I was attempting to
change the procedures of the agency to make sure that they
complied with the law in the future and to eliminate any holdings
we had that we should not have had.
MR. ROWAN: Why was the White House not informed?
MR. COLBY: I think the e was just a misunderstanding as to
why that wasn't done. We did inform the then Chairmen?act-
ing Chairman?of our Oversight Committees in the Congress;
we then issued a series of directives very specifically instructing
our people how to conduct their affairs in the future so there
would be no further violation of law, and in that situation I
thought it best to let the misdeeds of the past sit quietly. I did
not see that there was anything serious enough in there to war-
rant prosecution against any individual.
MR. ROWAN: You mentioned informing members of Con-
gress. Did they take any substantive action or did they let the
matter just lie?
MR. COLBY: At least one of them asked a lot of additional
questions and sought further assurances no further action would
be taken.
MR. ROWAN: You indicated that on your own you decided
there should be no prosecution. Under which authorities did you
act?
MR. COLBY: I did not see enough that warranted, to me, a
request to the Department of Justice to prosecute. The question
never came up in a direct form.
(Announcements)
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MR. KILPATRICK: Under the 1949 act, the CIA is exempt
from the usual accounting procedures that apply to the budget
and personnel of every other agency of the government. Is there
really any point in maintaining such absolute secrecy over public
funds being spent by your agency?
MR. COLBY: Earlier in the history of CIA we exposed about
half of our budget to GAO audit. Later on the GAP determined
that it felt it could not conduct an adequate audit of half of it,
if they did not know the whole. There are certain things, of
course, in our clandestine activity that must be kept from public
exposure and even the risk of public exposure.
MR. KILPATRICK: I can understand why the details of your
budget might well be kept secret, but why is it necessary to con-
ceal from the American people whether you are spending one
billion, two billion, five billion or whatever the sum is?
MR. COLBY: In 1947 the weapons expenditures of the Atomic
Energy Commission consisted of a one line item. Last year they
consisted of 15 pages of detailed explanation. I think it is in-
evitable that if you expose a single figure, you will immediately
get a debate as to what it includes, what it does not include, why
did it go up, why did it go down, and you will very shortly get
into a description of the details of our activities.
MR. KILPATRICK: It is a political reason, is it not, sir, that
your budget would be especially vulnerable to being cut by mem-
bers of the Congress who oppose the agency?
MR. COLBY: I don't think so. I think the responsible mem-
bers of the Congress would support a good intelligence service
and a good intelligence program, and I think we have the best
in the world.
MR. GELB: Would the 1947 act that established the CIA
prohibit the CIA from collecting intelligence or providing sup-
port to collect intellig7ce within the United States on domestic
individuals or groups?
MR. COLBY: Yes. The act says clearly that the Agency will
have no subpoena, police, law enforcement powers or internal
security function. That does not mean that the Agency can do
nothing in the United States. It can do certain things related to
foreign intelligence within the United States.
MR. GELB: When you appeared before various congressional
committees?
MR. COLBY: Many.
MR. GELB: Many is right. In the wake of the disclosures
about CIA collection of ten thousand or more dossiers of bugging
and surveillance and what-not, you did not refer to these activi-
ties as illegal; in fact, you said they were not illegal, they were
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merely missteps. How do you reconcile that congressional testi-
mony with what you just said now?
MR. COLBY: I have said that they were wrong. I think wrong
is a word that covers those few missteps and misdeeds that CIA
has conducted over 28 years.
MR. GELB: Does wrong mean illegal?
MR. COLBY: Sometimes it does; sometimes it merely means
we were outside our charter, although there is nothing otherwise
illegal about the activity.
MR. GELB: Does outside the charter mean it was illegal?
MR. COLBY: It means it is wrong for CIA to do it. It was not
necessarily a crime that it be done, but it was wrong for CIA to
do it.
MR. GELB: Was it ijiegal for the CIA to develop and collect
these ten thousand anymore dossiers?
MR. COLBY: It was not illegal to collect them all. The allega-
tion against CIA was that it conducted a massive illegal domestic
operation during the Nixon administration. The operation began
in the Johnson administration. It was not massive. As you will
note, on page 149 of the Rockefeller Commission Report, it re-
ferred to three agents who were wrongly used.
There was a collection of paper also collected, mainly FBI re-
ports and newspaper clippings. It was improper to collect some
of these things, but I think that the word "wrong" covers both
the actions which technically may have been illegal and the
things that we had no right to do.
MR. GELB: But the Rockefeller Commission itself labeled
most of these activities as unlawful. That is their word.
MR. COLBY: A number of our activities were unlawful in the
past. There Were a few, but not?this particular program, I
think, was not labeled as unlawful.
MR. ROSS: The Murphy Commission on foreign policy has
just come out with a report saying that the 40 Committee in
the White House which is supposed to supervise the CIA activi-
ties, has been meeting only infrequently and informally.
Douglas Dillon, who was a member of the Rockefeller Commis-
sion, said there has never been any real oversight of the CIA.
How then could a series of Presidents and a series of Directors
of the Central Intelligence Agency tell the American people that
the CIA was under tight control?
MR. COLBY: I think I will let the Presidents speak for them-
selves. The reason the 40 Committee has not met very often is
because during the fifties and sixties the CIA was engaged in
many activities abroad of a political and paramilitary character.
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In the last few years that activity has dwindled to almost noth-
ing. We do very little of that work today abroad, and therefore
there is much less occasion for the 40 Committee to meet and
discuss those activities.
MR. ROSS: When you say "little," what do you mean by
"little?" How many covert operations is the agency conducting
around the world right now?
MR. COLBY: I really cannot give you specifics or the figures,
but I would say it is a very small percentage of our total budget
at the moment.
MR. ROSS: Reverting to the control issue, John McCone said
that while he was Director of the CIA he didn't know that plan-
ning was going forward to assassinate Castro. You have said
that you didn't know about many things going on in the CIA,
including the fact that the Justice Department gave you the
authority to control your own lawbreakers. Doesn't that indicate
once again that the CIA was out of control of even its own Direc-
tors?
MR. COLBY: No, I don't think so. In any large organization,
and CIA is a large organization with activities 11 around the
world, every detail will not necessarily be known.
I learned of the arrangement with the Rockefe er Commission
when I was apprised of a problem which might involve that, and
it looked that it was not supportable to me, and so I discussed it
with the acting Attorney General who withdrew that arrange-
ment.
MR. SPIVAK: Mr. Colby, as one who knows the CIA from
long association with it and who, I assume, is dedicated to the
security of this nation, will you give us your appraisal of whether
the investigations have on the whole been good or bad for the
country?
MR. COLBY: I think there are both goods and bads, Mr.
Spivak. I think that the good is that we are in the process of
updating the old image of intelligence that is carried by many
Americans to the new reality of intelligence, that intelligence
today is more than the old spy story or the TV spectacular on
Saturday night. It now consists of an intellectual process of
putting bits and pieces together, analyzing them, of collecting
information from open sources wherever we can get them around
the world, from technical capabilities of which we, as Americans,
have developed perhaps the most impressive collection in the
world, and also some clandestine activity, of course, against those
closed societies that can pose a threat to our country.
On the bad side, I thing, are the sensational and irresponsible
leaks and discussions that go on, so that the characterization of
our intelligence apparatus still does suffer that old image.
I am interested, really, in trying to focus on the 70s and 80s
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and forget about the 150s and 60s, but I am having a hard time
doing it.
MR. SPIVAK: Earlier this year you were reported as saying
that exaggerated charges of improper conduct of the CIA had
placed?and these were your words?"placed American intelli-
gence in danger." What do you consider the most exaggerated
charges that have been made against the CIA?
MR. COLBY: The massive illegal domestic operation, and I
think some other charges have been made which are totally out
of context in the total picture.
I think here we have a difficulty that is perhaps a difference of
profession between the journalistic profession and the intelli-
gence profession. We try to put the jigsaw pieces together to
draw from them the whole picture and present the whole thing
in proportion. I think the journalistic profession, because of the
nature of its media, is inclined to focus on the individual jigsaw
piece and to bring that as typical of the whole, and that has
given me a great deal of difficulty.
MR. SPIVAK: The charges that have been made against the
CIA?and the investigations themselves have really raised so
many doubts in the minds of the American people?that many
people believe that the organization ought to be abolished alto-
gether, and that if a new one is needed, why, a new one should be
started. What is your reaction to that?
MR. COLBY: I think the CIA today?as I said, it may have
done some things in the past which were either mistakes or
wrong, but the CIA today is the best intelligence service in the
world; it has the most dedicated and talented group of people
working for it o any intelligence service in the world. It is the
envy of the foreign nations.
I think that any attempt to disband it would leave our nation
vulnerable in a world in which we now sit 30 minutes away from
a nuclear missile aimed and cocked as us in a world in which our
economic resources can be throttled by hostile foreign nations in
a world in which nuclear proliferation can pose a danger to all
of us.
I think we need good intelligence. I think we have got it, and
I think we should continue.
MR. ROWAN: I'd like to ask you something about, not the
CIA, which you administer, but in your role as Director of Cen-
tral Intelligence, you oversee the entire intelligence community,
and I would like to ask you if the National Security Agency
regularly monitors telephone calls between foreign?between
American citizens and citizens in foreign countries?
MR. COLBY: I think the National Security Agency's activities
are known to include the following of foreign communications. I
think that is all I would like to say about that.
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MR. ROWAN: What I am trying to get at is to find out if, in
the course of their activities involving foreigners, massive rec-
ords are kept on the number of calls, the places calls are made
to from this country by American citizens.
MR. COLBY: I would defer to the Department of Defense for
the answer to that.
MR. KILPATRICK: But pursuing that for just a moment, sir,
the Rockefeller Commission talked about Communist intelligence
efforts within the United States and said that the Soviet Union,
we gather, is making extraordinary use of electronic technology,
monitoring and recording thousands of private telephone con-
versations within the United States. Could you amplify that?
MR. COLBY: The Soviet Union does have a very extensive
communications intelligence/effort around the world. You have
seen their trawlers off our coast; they follow our fleets when
they move. They have an extensive effort of that kind.
MR. KILPATRICK: Are they monitoring domestic telephone
conversations to your knowledge?
MR. COLBY: There are an awful lot of antenna on top of the
Soviet Embassy, and I think they are there for a purpose.
MR. KILPATRICK: The estimate was 500,000 intelligence op-
eratives in the Communist bloc nations; that was the estimate of
the Rockefeller Commission. Is that your estimate also, sir?
MR. COLBY: I think that is a close figure.
MR. GELB: The Rockefeller Commission seems to describe
the chaos operation of the CIA, the collection of the files, bug-
ging, surveillance and so forth, as large, illegal, and domestic.
Let me quote from their report. They said, "The CIA ex-
ceeded its statutory authority in these operations." It said the
operations were a repository for large quantities of information
on domestic activities of Americans. It talked about the large
number of activities and the veritable mountain of material.
Wouldn't this substantiate a charge of massive, illegal, domes-
tic operations?
MR. COLBY: I don't think so. I think the word "illegal" ob-
viously does apply to certain of the activities, but as I indicated,
the Rockefeller Commission found threeAgents whose work was
illegal. I don't think that is massively illegal. Those three agents
were improper, there is no question about it.
With respect to the files, as the Commission found after look-
ing at our files, most of the files consisted of FBI reports and
clippings from the newspaper.
In my opinion, we should not have kept all those, but in the
period of the time that this was going on, when you had a
quarter of a million people demonstrating outside of the White
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House, when you had 4,000 bombings occur in one year in this
country, I think there was considerable concern as to whether
this was indigenous or was being stimulated and supported by
foreign intelligence or security services.
MR. GELB: But our own studies showed that these were not
connected with foreign intelligence activities.
MR. COLBY: And it's by studying it, we found they were not
connected. If we had not studied it, we could not make that find-
ing.
MR. GELB: But you could make that argument by saying you
would have to keep studying something forever to insure it didn't
have a foreign connection.
MR. COLBY: No, I don't think you do. You respond to a
present need, a present problem, a present danger. We termin-
ated this operation a year and a half ago, because the problem
has gone away in great part, and consequently there is not a
reason for continuing that kind of an effort to identify foreign
links to American dissident organizations./
MR. ROSS: Senator Church says that his intelligence commit-
tee has not been able to find evidence of an order from any Presi-
dent to the CIA to plan assassinations. Does that mean the CIA
was acting on its own in this area?
MR. COLBY: I don't believe that I want to talk about the
subject of assassinations. This is a very difficult and complex
subject. Some of the facts are not well known or not well re-
corded, and some of the degree to which various people within
and outside of the agency were a part of any such activity is not
very clear.
We have reported on this fully to the committees and we will
do so, but I do not think it appropriate for public discussion.
MR. ROSS: Let me turn to another area them. The CIA placed
the Shah of Iran back on his throne in the mid-fifties. The Shah
is now one of the principal reasons why we are paying a great
deal more money for our oil. In this instance, as in others,
mightn't it have been better to just allow events to take their
normal course?
MR. COLBY: And allow the Communist Party of Iran to take
over that country? I doubt that. I think you would have been
stopped from the oil long before this.
MR. ROSS: Would not oil possibly be cheaper, being bought
from the Communist countries? After all we have engaged in
some sort of an attempt to negotiate fo atural gas from the
Soviet Union. Mightn't that be a cheaper price than we are pay-
ing out of the Persian Gulf right now?
MR. COLBY: In the mid-fifties, the problem of Communist
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expansion was a very great danger around the world, and we did
a lot of things to prevent it.
In the seventies we have begun the process of negotiation with
a Communist world which is, itself, divided in the Sino-Soviet
split. You have a totally different strategic situation we are fac-
ing today than the one we faced in the fifties.
MR. SPIVAK: The public has been deeply concerned by the
stories of CIA involvement in plotting to assassinate foreign
leaders. Don't you think it would be better to release the full
and true story lest rumors and speculations make it seem a lot
worse than it is?
MR. COLBY: No, Mr. Spivak. The instructions in the agency
are quite clear, that the agency will not engage in, support or
stimulate or condone assassination at this time. Those instruc-
tions have been issued by the agency for several years now.
MR. SPIVAK: We are talking about the past though.
MR. COLBY: I do not think it useful to our country to go into
a great exposure of things that happened in the fifties and six-
ties, and I think that that subject had best be settled by adopting
a firm policy at this point not to use such activity and letting the
past stay quiet.
MR. SPIVAK: May I take you jo one thing that is happening
now? Rumors are being sprea that the CIA is somehow in-
volved in attempts to get rid o Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
Can you categorically state that?
MR. COLBY: I categorically deny that.
MR. SPIVAK: ?is CIA not involved in any way?
MR. COLBY: I categorically deny that.
MR. ROWAN: The Rockefeller Report said that one of the
CIA's computer systems had information on 300,000 Americans
in it. You have testified that the CIA maintains 40 to 50 such
record systems. I am wondering, can you tell us how many
Americans are in the CIA's computer files or can you estimate
that number?
MR. COLBY: No, I can't, Mr. Rowan. We obviously have
many, many Americans in our files, applicants, people who had
clearances, people who have reported to us, sources of what is
going on abroad. We have large numbers of Americans in our
files. There is a great overlap in them, and I am unable to come
out with a total.
MR. ROWAN: One quick followup question: Has the CIA
computer system been used not just to keep files but to do model-
ing and predicting, to try to predict the behavior of people?
MR. COLBY: I do not believe so, no. I am pretty sure that has
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not been used as a prediction?we obviously use computers a
great deal in our business of analyzing material, storing it, re-
trieving it and so forth. As to predictability of personal 1be-
havior, of human vior, there have been some experiments I
think in modeling to/see whether patterns grow and whether
similar behavior is owed in future times, but this is conducted
under the strict rules applicable to this kind of research and de-
velopment.
MR. KILPATRICK: The Murphy Commission has recom-
mended that the CIA be renamed the Foreign Intelligence Agen-
cy. Would that help your public relations problem?
MR. COLBY: I think if you just changed the name, our friends
of the press would quickly penetrate that as being sort of a
cosmetic change and not a real one, although the word "foreign"
I am all for. In my confirmation hearing I suggested that you
add the word "foreign" before the word "intelligence" wherever
it appears in the act.
MR. GELB: If you thought a member of the CIA was, say,
leaking information to Mr. Spivak, would you be empowered un-
der the law to surveil and wire tap and bug Mr. Spivak?
MR. COLBY: No, absolutely not, and I would not be empow-
ered under even the legislation I recommend to improve our
secrecy; I would not be allowed to do anything with respect to
an outsider. I would be allowed to follow within the agency the
activities of one of our employees that I thought was in some
way misbehaving. I have the same authority in that respect as
the head of any governmental organization like the Fish and
Wildlife Service, to be responsible for his own employees and
their behavior.
MR. ROSS: The Rockefeller Commission suggested it might
not be such a good idea to have a career man as had of the CIA.
Do you think that is a hint from the White House /that you may-
be ought to resign?
MR. COLBY: I don't think that is a hint. I serve totally at the
pleasure of the President, and he can turn his pleasure some-
where else any time he wishes. I will do my duty. As long as
he thinks I am useful, I will stay.
MR. SPIVAK: I am sorry to interrupt, but our time is almost
up and we won't be able to get in another question and certainly
not another answer.
Thank you, Mr. Colby, for being with us today on MEET THE
PRESS.
MR. COLBY: Thank you.
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gL gi.diri
MEET THE PRESS
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