ADMIRAL TURNER`S REMARKS TO NATIONAL NEWSPAPERS ASSOCIATION CIA AUDITORIUM

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00498R000200080012-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 13
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 29, 2007
• Sequence Number: 12
• Publication Date: March 9, 1978
• Content Type: REPORT

Approved For Release 2007/03129: CIA-RDP99-004988000200080012-2
AD141IRAL TURNER's REMARKS
TO
1
NATIONAL NEWSPAPERS ASSOCIATION
CIA AUDITORIUM
1530-1630, 9 March 1978
Good afternoon, I hope you enjoyed the film clip. I'd
like to say that it is indicative of some of the new things
going on around here that we have that available, because it
was originally intended, when we made it, to be part of what
you've heard of as the famous public tours of the Central
Intelligence Agency that never took place. What happened was
we wanted to open up to the public more so we decided we
would explore this possibility. Some of your co-freres in
the media community got hold of that information and published
it as an established fact before it was in fact decided by
us. We went ahead, developed the film, developed the proced.ur.es
to have tours, experimented with families from the CIA, and.
found it was really just impossible in the space we had
availab e and without tying our working operation here up
completely to do that. But we have wanted to open up more
and decided what we would do instead of having open public
tours for everybody, was to be more receptive to inviting
groups :Like yours here to be with us and we are delighted
you're one of the first to share in this neiv program of greater
openness;, greater hospitality out here. I think it is important
that we do share more of our intelligence community's
activities with the public today than ever before. For
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several reasons--one is that intelligence is more important
to all of us as a country and as citizens of the United States
today than it has ever been. If you look back, we have come
from an era of total military superiority to one of parity--or
close 'to parity, something like that. Under these circumstances
intelligence, the ability to know what the other fellow is doing,
building, planning, is just much more important than when you
had so much military power relative to anyone else in the world,
it wasn't critical that you be at the right place at the right
time, with the right thing. If you look back at the end of
World VVar II, we were -also the dominant political power in the
world. Most everybody else in the smaller nations followed our
lead. Today, can you think of even the most insignificant
little nation in the United Nations taking the lead from anybody
else? That is just not the tenor of the times. They are all
independent and properly so. I'm not complaining about eithex
of these changes, I'm just acknowledging the facts. We have
to know more about what the attitudes, the outlooks, the
aspirations of many other nations are if we are going to do the
job our country needs to do as, of course, one of the leading
powers in the world.
Thirty years ago we were economically independent. Today
I hardly need mention that we are interdependent economically, as
each of us looks at the temperature on our thermostat and
thinks about the conditions in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere.
There is another reason we want to be more open and that is that
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in the last three and a quarter years, the intelligence
community of our country has gone under a lot of public
scrutiny and criticism, .mainly in the media. Some of it
justified, some of it probably not. But today, having been
exposed so much by this period of investigations of the Church
Committee, the Pike Committee, the Rockefeller Commission, and
the many stories in the media. There are more questions in
the American public's mind about what we are doing, how we are
doing it, whether we are doing it well. I think it is up to
us as ;part of the democratic institutions of our country to
respond to those questions.
I'd like to respond to them today for you, by trying to
describe four ways in which our intelligence activities in this
country are evolving, are changing today from what they have
traditionally been. I hope that in the process of doing this
we'll ;get some flavor as to how we do go about our business, and
then I would really like to stop and respond to your questions.
B~~ut first, and quickly, the product of intelligence is
different today than it was 30 years ago Last September when
this Agency was founded. Look back. In those days we were
primarily interested in military intelligence about the
Soviet Union. We were concerned with their Eastern European
satellites, and with China, and we paid attention every time
they made a foray out in the Third LVorld and attempted. to
establish a new position. But basically, what tae were
interested in, what our product was, was determined by where
the Soviets were doing things and what they were doing.
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There was one other characteristic of it then which carried
on for quite some time, because when the Soviets did make
a foray out in the Third World this country turned to its
intelligence community not only for information--intelligence
about what was going on--but also they asked the intelligence
community to do something about it; to help influence those
events, and that's what we call covert political action. The
Central Intelligence Agency was there in 1953 when the
government changed from communist to democratic in Tran; in
1954 similarly in Guatemala; we were there as you all know
in the 1960s in Cuba; we played an important and positive
role in Vietnam and as recently as 1975 we were conducting
political action in Angola, until the Congress decided that
was not what the country wanted and ordered a cessation. But
now look at how the world has changed since those early days,
when our intelligence was driven largely by Soviet military
considerations, to today.
Today, we can't be limited to the Soviet Union and a dozen
or so other countries of primary intelligence focus. We have
interchange, important relations of one sort or another, with
most of the 150 some nations of the world. With most of th.ase
our relationship is not primarily about military matters, but
economic and political. So if we are going to serve our
decisio:nmakers, our policymakers in this government well, tae
in the intelligence community must be able to provide good
information about a wide range of geographical areas, a large
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number of these 150 some countries and about adiversity
of topics, economic, political, as well as military.
Secondly, look at how it has changed with respect to
the country's attitude towards covert political action. That
is not something that the country feels it wants to do as
much today as it did in the past. Beyond that, I would say
to you that it is also, in my opinion, not as applicable, it's
not as useful a tool in foreign policy today as it may have
been ir.~ times past. So, there is much less emphasis in the
Central. Intelligence Agency today on covert political action
than trAere has been heretofore. I don't say we should eschew
that capability as a nation. There are times when it may be
far preferable to sending in the marines; there are times when
it may be the most appropriate vehicle, but it must be used
judiciously and it must be used under very proper control. I'll
speak a little bit more of those.
Let me move on first to the second major change in
American intelligence that is going about today, and that's
a new production line. We not only have a new product, but
we have to produce it in a different way. Now the traditional
intelligence production line has always been the human agent,
the spy. You remember, Joshua sent two of them into Jericho
before :he marched around with his trumpets. The human agent
has been the principal tool of intelligence ever since; at least
until a decade or decade and a half ago, when we began a
technological revolution in intelligence collection--collecting
the data, collecting the information on which you build
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intelligence estimates. We now have what we call technical
means of collecting information that just bring in vast
quantities of data. It's unbelievable sometimes how rapidly
the data flow is increasing: Sometimes it almost swamps us,
but now interestingly, this does not denigrate the role,
the importance, the necessity of the traditional human
intelligence agent. Because very generally, broadly speaking,
what the technical collection systems tell you is what
happened in this place or that yesterday or today. But they
very seldom tell you what are they going to do tomorrow. When
I takc: some of this vast quantity of data down and talk to
one of our policymakers and say, look what just happened over
here, they look at me and they say, Stan, ~vhy? why did they
do that, or what are they going to do tomorrow. That, probing
into what people intend to do, what their plans and thoughts are,
is the forte of the human intelligence agent. So, the more we
collect from the technical systems the more we must complement
that with the traditional human intelligence systems.
But let me go back. The production line is different.
It`s riow a meshing of a number of different types of intelligence
collet;tion machinery that must be kept well-oiled, must be
well-organized, must be times and integrated, as distinct from
a sin?;le piece of machinery that was the production line in
the past. It takes different skills, different bureaucratic
organizations, different outlooks, and we are in the process
of adjusting to some of those changes. I know that in the
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newspaper business it is always easy to make organizationa]_
changes, nobody resists any changes in the structure of your
organizations or their titles, or roles, or salaries or
anything else.,' But in the government bureaucracy it isn't
quite ]Like that. We have some problems when we want to make
changes.
The third change, also causes us problems, because it i.s
a starl~;ly different one, it's what I started out by saying
and that is the policy of openness. I think we have no
choice but to be more open today. But there are risks in this,
particularly when you remember that we are working against
an impl.aeable and secretive enemy, the KGB. But there are
benefits in being more open because we are a democracy, and
this organization, the rest of the intelligence organizations
of our country, simply cannot survive, cannot obtain the
support they need, unless the American people are behind them.
The American people accepted intelligence five years ago,
they accepted its necessity and its secrecy. But due to the
questioning we've had, that no longer is the case. So we
are opening up more, but let me not mislead you, there is no
way we can open up totally. In intelligence, there are things
you must do in order to collect the information you need, that
simply can't be done if they are announced or known in
advance. So we must retain a lot of secrecy.
There are two basic functions in intelligence, one is
collecting information and the other is analyzing it, and
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drawing conclusions from it because the best spy in the
world seldom goes to the blackboard and says, I just got the
following information and it's all there, it's absolutely
incisi~re, and you believe it completely. No, you have to
take that man's clue and this technical intelligence systems
clue and your intuition and a few other things and you
piece i_t together like a picture puzzle. That's the estimating,
the analytic process. We can't tell you very much about the
collect:ion process, because if we have to collect it through
intelligence it's generally because the other fellow doesn't
want to give it.out. So if you tell him how you're getting it,
he turns it off. He can't always, but generally speaking there
is a countermeasure for every measure in one degree or another.
So, we have to be very tight about what we say, about how we
collect. information. People's lives are at stake, expensive
technical collection systems that you and T have paid for
as taxpayers are at stake. But when it comes to talking about
our analysis, our estimates, our conclusions, we can share
more. Now what we can't share is the unique information that
gives our President, our cabinet officers, our military
commanders, our ambassadors in the field, unique advantage
because they have that information and other people don`t
know that they have that information. If you're sitting down
to negotiate a new contract with your labor union and you
know their negotiating position, you don't want to tell
them that. It's the same way in the intelligence game.
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So, we today, when we make an estimate, we look at it
carefully and we say, if we took out of that the information
about how we got the data, that we cannot afford to disclose,
and we took out those pieces of intelligence that are very
uniquely important to our country, would the estimate have
enough substance left, would it be of enough value if published
to help improve the quality of the national dabaLe on this topic.
Would it aid the general public. If it does, we publish it.
We have published about two studies, estimates a week in the
past ;year. Did you hear about the one on our prediction of
the world energy crisis situation last ATarch that we published,
which said that in the next four or five years we believe the
world will want to take out of the ground more oil than it will
be ab:1e to. We didn't say there isn't enough oil down there,
we didn't say we were going to run out of oil. tiVe just said
that sometime between now and the mid-1980s there i.s going
to be pressure on prices because the curve af_ demand is going
up more steeply than the curve of supply can be made to go up
in that time frame. If you look further out, that's another
story.. We published a study last spring about the world
steel situation. It said, for instance, that there is no
major steel producing country that is working at more than
75o capacity today. Many countries, particularly lesser
developed countries, are bringing new steel producing capacity
on to line and we do not see in the four or five years any
prospect that demand is going to rise sufficiently to take
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advantage of the capacity that exists today, let alone that
which is being added to the world's capacity. So, there is
an interesting situation in the steel world. We have done
one on international terrorism and its effect on American
interE;sts overseas, American business overseas. And we've
done crne just recently on the comparative costs of Soviet
military expenditures, American military expenditures, and
so on. We think all of these, we hope, are of some value and.
interest to the American public.
In addition, in a sort of Machiavellian way, I hope that
publishing more of these studies is going to help us with the
problem of security of the information we must keep secretive.
Because obviously the risk in going to a policy of greater
openness is that you will overstep the bounds, you will open
the door a crack and secrets will leak out that you don't want
leaked out. But another problem in keeping secrets, is when
you have too many secrets it is difficult to keep them,. because
people don't respect that label. You know we label the tape of
the paper SECRET, TOP SECRET, CONFIDENTIAL, BURN BEFORE READING,
people don't respect those labels when everything is labeled.
something like that. So by reducing the corpus of classified
information I hope to generate greater respect for what
remains and a greater tightness which is very critical to
our overall intelligence operation.
The fourth change is what is known as greater oversight,
Now here we have a paradox, because when you have to operate
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partially in secrecy you cannot at the same time have the
kind of public oversight that we like as Americans over our
national institutions. ~Ue want to be able to check on what's
being done in the Department of Commerce or Department of
Labor, or elsewhere, so that we know the government is
being run in accordance with the constitution and the standards
that have been established. You can't quite have that with
intelligence. So what we have generated, I believe, out of
these last three years of criticism, out of the crucible of
this criticism, has been a process I label surrogate public
oversight. You can't all oversee us completely, but you
have surrogates; the President and the Vice President, very
active participants in the intelligence process today. You
have under the President a special board called the Intelligence
Oversight Board, three distinguished citizens who report only
to the President and whose only funct~.on is to check on me,
to check on the intelligence operations, they are not beholden
to me. Anyone in the intelligence community can go to them
directly and say look, Turner is doing something wrong. They
are very important as a reassurance. But most importantly
perhaps we also have established in the last two years, ttiao
netia committees in the Congress; one in each chamber, each
dedicated to the oversight process. I report to them regularly
and quite fully about our intelligence activities. There axe
new rules in this Executive Order Herb described to you which
regulate this whole process, and establish checkpoints in which
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I must go through the Attorney General and other checkpoints
where I must go through the National Security Council in
order t.o be sure there is a harmony between the national
policy and the intelligence activities; in order to ensure
that these intelligence activities are conduced with the full
regard for the rights and privileges and the privacy of the
American citizen. I think the process is a good one. It's
still evolving, the Congress is now working on legislative
charters for the intelligence community. They will codify some
of the things that are in the Executive Order that the President
recently signed and they will set forth, in law, the rules for
operating our intelligence community.
Now, there are clearly risks in this. If there is too much
oversight, too many people get in the act, there is too great a
risk that there will be leaks of important inf-orma.tion. If
there is too much detailed oversight there will be risks that
we will not be able to do the things that need to be done, we
will be hamstrung. I would say to you in all candor, that I
can't assure you today that those risks will not come true.
It tivill take a year or two of working out this process with
the intelligence committees and working with the intelligence
oversight board and all these new regulations to find the
right level; to find the right amount of oversight to assure
the American public the right amount of freedom for us to
ensure that we can do the job that is necessary, in my opinion,
to protect you, the American public, also. 1Ve as citizens all
need to be sure that our policymakers have the best information
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upon which to make the decisions for all of us. I am
confidE;nt in my mind that this process will work itself out
well, but it isn't there yet and I think you will enjoy
over the next several years watching it evolve because it
is a very important process for each of us. I can only
assure you that I believe we have today the best intelligence
activities, the best intelligence capabilities in the world.
I assure you I intend to do all I can in the years ahead to
keep it. that way. Thank you.