AN ADMIRAL FOR THE CIA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00498R000100070062-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 14, 2007
• Sequence Number: 62
• Publication Date: February 21, 1977
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Approved For Release 200 IA-RDP99-00498
iu~~~.
ON PAGE
n Admiral
T hey hardly knew one another at An-
napolis 30 years ago and had met
only once since those wartime college
days. But former Navy Lt. James Earl
Carter Jr. remembered: he recently had
corresponded with his classmate, Adm.
Stansfield Turner, 53, and last week he
nominated him to be director of the Cen-
tral Intelligence Agency. The idea came
to Carter one morning before breakfast.
As a veteran weapons-system analyst,
past president of the Naval War College
and current commander of NATO forces
in southern Europe, Turner should be a
natural for the CIA job. Carter told aides
that it was the best "wakin' up thought"
he had in a long time. Turner was imme-
diately summoned from his post in Na-
ples tobegin the personal diplomacy that
by last week made his Senate confirma-
tion seem all but assured.
Mindful of the forced withdrawal of
his first nominee for CIA director, Theo-
dore Sorensen, Carter was counting not
only on Turner's military and intellectu-
al qualifications but also on a careful
White House effort to smooth his way
with members of the Serlate intelligence
21 FEBRUARY 1977
for the CIA
committee. Most senators to. whom
Turner was introduced last week gave
high marks to the former Rhodes scholar,
who seems equally comfortable talking
about impressionist art (he favors Monet
and Pissarro) and the naval balance.
Even liberals who don't favor a military
man in the nation's top intelligence job
seemed to agree that Turner was the best
of the lot, a sophisticated analyst who
recently warned other brass hats against
exaggerating Russian military might.
"This is an uncoinmon admiral," said
Colorado Sen.. Gary Hart, "a philos-
opher, a thinker within the system."
The admiral and his Commander in
Chief were far from buddies at Annap-
olis. "He was so far ahead of us," Carter
told his Cabinet last week, "that we
never considered him competition or
even a peer." (After transferring from
Amherst College, Turner graduated 25th
in a class of 820; Carter was 60th.) But the
two men met five years ago when Turner
invited the then governor of Georgia to
the Naval War College to discuss govern-
ment reorganization, and they have cor-
responded ever since. "All along, Jimmy
From sailor to CIA chief: An-
napolis classmates Carter and
Turner in the 1947 yearbook
and meeting in the Oval Office.
had the idea he was going to use Turner
for something," one top White House
staffer said, most likely as chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff or Chief of Naval
Operations when those posts become
open. Those prospects, in fact, may have
kept Carter from thinking of him for the
CIA at first. -
Combat: Turner's background is in-
distinguished. After graduating
deed
from Annapolis, he served bri efly at sea,
studied philosophy, politics and eco-
nomics at Oxford, then divided his time
between destroyer duty and Pentagon
posts. He won a Bronze Star during com-
bat in the Korean War and commanded a
missile frigate off Vietnam. Turner also
served as executive assistant to former
Navy Secretary Paul Ignatius (1967-69),
advising on budget and manpower prob-
lems among other matters, and later
joined Chief of Naval Operations Elmo
Zumwalt's "Project 60" team to modern-
ize the Navy-stem to stern. -
But it was at the Naval War College
from 1972 to 1974 that Turner attracted
most attention, scrapping the traditional
leisurely program and forcing his officer-
students to study everything from Thu-
eydides to the Cuban missile crisis. He
also set up seminars with academics and
editors. "Some tempers exploded,".one
naval officer recalled of a meeting with
journalists, "but it ventilated the hostil-
ity and both sides learned something."
The same unregimented attitude
marks Turner's approach to national se-
curity. Writing in last month's issue of
Foreign Affairs, he suggested that simply
comparing the numbers of U.S. and Sovi-
etsubmarines or missiles was less impor-
tant than judging the over-all ability of
each nation's armed forces to carry out
assigned missions-both military and
psychological. "A doomsday picture con-
vincingly drawn for a Congressional
budgetary committee may negatively in-
fluence other nations' perceptions of our
naval effectiveness,". Turner . warned. .
"And a few extra ships in the budget or at
sea may not be enough to overcome an
inaccurate perception-of weakness."
_ Abuses: If Turner is confirmed, some.
liberals may try to pass legislation that
would ban a military man from the..CIA
post in the future. Civilians, they argue,
are generally more sensitive to the civil-
liberties questions that have plagued the
intelligence community since its history
of "dirty tricks" was -revealed-after Wa-
tergate. CIA veterans, too, have qualms
about leaders in uniform-Adm. William
Raborn won little respect from the
professionals during his brief term as
CIA chief in the Lyndon Johnson years.
But Stansfield Turner-"a scholar and
thinker first and a military man second,"
according to a top Carter adviser-seems
likely to pass their muster: Whether he
can also maintain firm control of U.S. -
intelligencepreventing abuses and as-
suring the-impartiality of strategic esti-
mates-still remains to be seen.
-DAVID M. ALPERN with LLOYD H. NORMAN and NICHOLAS
HORROCK in Washington