ADMIRAL STANSFIELD TURNER, DCI, ADDRESS TO AMHERST, SMITH, VASSAR AND WILLIAMS, WASH., D.C., ALUMNI CLUBS 19 MARCH 1980

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00498R000200130012-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 8
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 15, 2007
• Sequence Number: 12
• Publication Date: March 21, 1980
• Content Type: REPORT

Approved For Release 2007/03/15: CIA-RDP99-00498R00020Saa b} q22 anscript
2 arch 1980
Admiral Stansfield Turner
Director of Central Intelligence
Address to Amherst, Smith, Vassar
and Williams, Wash.,D.C., Alumni Clubs
19 March 1980
Welcome to all of you from Amherst, Vassar, Smith and Williams.
I look back on my two years of life at Amherst as one of the
most important parts of my experience. Equally, I look on a
portion of those periods at Vassar and Smith as important too. I
can't say the same for Williams. I only went there once and
had the misfortune of being the quarterback on the undefeated
Amherst freshman football team that decided to throw a flat pass
from his 20-yard line in the fourth quarter and lost the game
on an interception.
You might be interested to know that two Amherst men, Judge
William Webster and myself, had lunch today in my office here in
the Central Intelligence Agency. A working lunch to coordinate
the efforts of the FBI and the CIA. You might wonder how two
liberally educated, clean-living Amherst men ended up as the number
one G-man and the number one spy of our Country. Certainly neither
of us anticipated this and I doubt that Amherst really thought
they were educating people to come to these two professions. But,
I am grateful that Amherst in my day, and I hope today, and I
assume the same is true for Vassar, Williams and Smith, does not
try to educate for a specific profession, but rather to make people
well-rounded, adaptable, and liberally educated. I know that I am
grateful to Amherst not for what they taught me in many, many
fields of interests, but for engendering in me a desire to know
those and other fields. I think this has helped Bill Webster and I
to shift gears and shift careers in our 50's. We both enjoyed our
first careers immensely. We both are excited by the careers we are
now engaged in and find them most challenging.
Intelligence is a very exciting profession today. It is
exciting because of the rate of change in the intelligence world.
First, the rate of technological change is tremendous. We are very
dependent for collecting intelligence information on technology, on
satellites, on listening posts, on computers, on data processing.
Even in the traditional field of human intelligence, the spy, we
use more and more technical gadgets to help people maintain their
cover, keep their identity fuzzy, permit them to communicate and
exchange information in difficult circumstances.
The other half of the intelligence profession is also changing
rapidly. What you collect you must analyze and draw conclusions
and estimates from. Even in this field where the orientation is
toward the social sciences, there is tremendous change. Even the
techniques of analysis are changing. Today, we can manipulate
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data in ways that let us extract unbelievable amounts of information.
We do quantitative analysis in fields of social science
and politics that you would not think were possible. The areas of
our interest, as contrasted with maybe 30 years ago when we concen-
trated on the military and some politics, are changing too. Today we
are deeply involved in countering international terrorism and the
flow of international narcotics, and learning more about the
world's food problem. Every year we do economic forecasting of all
types. We predict the Soviet grain harvest; the industrial capacity
of other nations; the health of world leaders. You are perhaps
familiar with our forecasts of the world energy outlook and the
Soviet oil capacity.
Today we don't concern ourselves as exclusively as heretofore
with the Soviet Union, its satellites and China. Look at the
pallet of problems on the President's desk tonight: Zimbabwe,
Kampuchea, Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, El Salvador. The intelligence
professional today is challenged to keep abreast in many more areas
and he must be familiar with many more academic disciplines.
Layered on top of this is the vast change in the environment
in which we must work, primarily the domestic environment. In the
past the intelligence activities of our country were largely
isolated and secret. Since 1975, and the Church Committee, the
Pike Committee, the Rockefeller Commission, with new means of
oversight by the Congress, the White House, and the Intelligence
Oversight Board, we are on the front page all the time. This may
not be quite analogous to the caterpillar who comes out of a cocoon
as a butterfly, but the result of this coming out from isolation is
that today in this more open environment the intelligence profession
is a very different profession, operating in a very different
intelligence community than in the past.
It has had an impact on our internal operations and organization.
It has impacted on how the intelligence community works with the
rest of the Executive Branch, with the Legislative Branch,
and also with the media and, through them with you, the public.
I would like to discuss this new environment and what it means
to us because it represents a significant change for the country
and is an issue of public concern. Today, the question before us
is, should the CIA be unshackled? If it should be, what should the
Congress do to check on us? What are the risks to your Constitutional
rights?
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Let me start with the impact of this new environment on us,
here in the CIA, on our internal organization and operations. In
the past, this big building next door had within it a number of
sub-divisions of effort, directorates, that did the work of the
Agency. They were meticulously compartmented from each other.
This was a great plus because it helped protect secrets. Secrecy
is absolutely fundamental for an intelligence organization.
The question of course is, how much secret is necessary? How much
secrecy is good? Obviously, there are risks when compartmentation
is too tight. You run the risk that people will make decisions
without all of the available facts. You run the risk that judgment
on a given decision will be too narrowly focused. I suggest that
if there have been mistakes made here in the past they have been
greatly exaggerated. They may have been caused by being overly
zealous or overly responsive, combined with too narrow a perspective
because of this separation of effort, but never through maliciousness
or callousness. When you have all the facts and the fellow sitting
next to you making the decision doesn't have them all, it is only
human nature to believe you have a better grasp on the problem than he.
Today, we are moving toward a more corporate organizational
structure. I use corporate in the best sense -- becoming more consul-
tative, more collegial, better organized for long run decision
making. We are trying not to become bureaucratic and inflexible.
In the CIA, all major decisions today are vetted through our key
officers. Interestingly, and I will talk more of this later, one
of those always is our General Counsel. You can't do much of
anything without running into the law today. Another is our
Legislative Counsel, because most of what we do has some interface
on Capital Hill. And another is our Public Affairs Officer,
because we simply must operate more openly than in the past.
This more corporate approach presents some risk to secrecy.
To minimize that risk, while we expand the number of offices
participating in decisionmaking, we try to minimize the number of
individuals who participate and the degree of detail that an
individual needs to carry out his role. For instance, I can make a
decision on whether to initiate a risky spy operation without
having to know the precise identity of the individual agent we are
going to employ. So, we are trying today to find a happy medium
between the dangers of isolated decisionmaking and the proliferation
of information about sensitive activities to a point that they
will no longer be secret. It is an important new dimension in our
work.
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So too, is the greater interaction with the Executive Branch.
It is a fact that the CIA is less independent today. We are
less like the small family business that we used to be and more one
part of a corporate conglomerate. Our board of directors in
the National Security Council, chaired by the President, provides a
far greater degree of direction to our collection, analysis
and covert actions - efforts to influence events in other
countries - than has ever been the case before.
There are pluses and minuses to increased NSC direction. A
big plus is that it ties us intimately to the policy makers
and their deliberations. We can be more effective in providing
data which they need if we know what their concerns really are and
what they are working on. However, at the same time, we must
always be scrupulously objective and not be influenced by the
policy makers, i.e., we must be careful not to produce intelligence
which just supports policy decisions that have already been made.
We are as careful as we can be not to be influenced by what decision-
makers may want to hear, but to give them sometimes the word about
the emperor and his clothes. Unfortunately, the more effective we
are, that is, the more useful our data is to the policy maker, and
the more he listens to us, the more likely his decision and that
data will coincide. Somebody will then conclude that the intelligence
was skewed to fit the policy rather than the policy being built
on the data. The better the system works, the more likely is the
charge that intelligence is politicized.
Necessary secrecy is also hazarded by this greater interface
with the rest of the Executive Branch. More people are involved
in sensitive activities, and the probability of a leak of secret
information is geometrically proportional to the number of people
who know it. It doesn't make any difference who the people are.
As you deal with the policy makers there is always the danger that
some people with misplaced loyalties will try to influence policy
by leaking secret information. When they feel very strongly about
a policy, if they feel there is no other way to influence that
policy, they may take their case to the public. The inhibitions of
self-restraint and patriotism that prevailed in this country before
Vietnam are not so prevalent in this no-holds-barred, post-Watergate
environment. I can assure you it makes our job much more difficult.
A third change as a result of the new environment in which we
must operate is the greater interplay we have with the Congress.
In years past, there was very little known on Capital Hill about
the CIA's activities. A few Senators, a few senior Representatives,
were informed, but their general attitude was, don't tell me too
much; I want to stay out of that. Today, that attitude is long
gone. I spent three hours on the Hill yesterday arguing as to
whether the Congress needed to know absolutely everything in every
file in the building. This renewed interest is not all bad, however.
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Dealing with the Congress helps us to keep in closer touch with the
American public and helps us understand what you want and expect
from us, as well as what you do not want. Dealing with the Congress
more also means, in effect, that they share some responsibility for
what we do. More interplay with the Congress gives us the benefit
of different insights into our activities, different views of it,
from people who are somewhat detached. We find their advice and
counsel most helpful. The primary disadvantage is, again, the
danger of leaking classified information. Congress is no better nor
worse than the Executive Branch in terms of leaks. Their motives
may be sometimes different, but any leak of classified information
does us the same damage.
Nonetheless, the process of sharing with the Congress and
gaining their advice has worked well in the three years I have
been privileged to participate in it. I want to continue that
relationship. Why is there then controversy over it? We are
attempting to codify into law what the current practices actually
are. What is happening, I'm afraid, is that, in trying to define
into law what current practice is, we are establishing a degree of
precision which does not now exist, and if introduced will eliminate
important flexibility. This replacement of some trust with all law
concentrates on two particular issues. How soon do we notify the
Congress of what we are going to do, or have done, and at what
level of detail?
The question of how soon is a very interesting constitutional
issue. What did the Founding Fathers intend when they created a
separation of powers? An editorial in a leading newspaper recently
complained that if the Congress was not informed of intelligence
community actions in advance of their implementation, the President
would be deprived of Congressional consultation. Well, consultation
has a nice voluntary ring to it, but when consultation is prescribed
by law it is not really consultation it is partnership. And in
effect, it gives the Congress a veto over a President's initiatives.
If a group - even a small group - knows about a secret activity and
anyone in that group disapproves of that activity, the easiest way
to stop it is to leak it. Too many individual vetoes like that -
and there always seems to be somebody who doesn't want to do
anything - can drive us to no action at all.
It seems to me the Founding Fathers intended that the Congress
exercise its will over the President by the power of the purse
strings and by the power to pass statutes that authorize certain
things and limit others. If the Congress were to pre-judge every
Presidential action in the field of intelligence, it would rob the
President of any opportunity to take necessary policy initiatives,
to lead. Instead, he would become a partner or perhaps a puppet of
the Congress.
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With respect to the amount of detail we must share with
the Congress, our concern is less with the actual sharing than with
perception of others outside our own country of how much we are
sharing - individuals who understand neither the importance nor the
purpose of bringing a Congress into the intelligence process.
Agents of ours overseas and intelligence services with whom we
work know that their effectiveness, even their well being, depends
on secrecy. They also know that the viability of a politician, a
Congressman, depends to a large extent on public relations. We
cannot easily persuade them that if they deal with us, and we
subsequently share that information in intimate detail with the
Congress, that it can be kept private. That their equities, maybe
their lives, will be protected.
In practice, the committees of Congress, in my three years of
association with them, have exercised extraordinarily good judgment
here and have not pressed us for a level of detail that was unnecessary.
To my knowledge, they have not complained for lack of adequate
information to do effective oversight. There may have been differences
between us in specific instances, but in every case we have resolved
them amicably and to their satisfaction. We just cannot be strapped
in by a lawyer dotting an "i" or crossing a "t" too precisely here
if at the same time we want the best intelligence.
Finally, this new environment of greater openness has changed
our relationship with the Fourth Estate and with the American
public. Intelligence services are accustomed to very little
publicity. Today, we get a lot, and it makes a real difference.
Better public relations is one thing. We need and seek some of
that. After all, as the result of the investigations of '75 and
'76, the American public has rightly questioned whether they need
us and if they do, then how much and why. No important public
institution in this country can thrive over a period of time
unless it has the support of the American public. We have tried
in recent years to be more open with you. But, we have been
more open in terms of adducing our product when it can be declassified.
Through our analyses and our studies we have hoped to provide the
public some the return for their investment in us. We are scrupulous
in not talking about our sources or our methods for the same
reasons every newspaperman refuses to reveal his sources. He
hopes to protect their confidence and perhaps use them again. We
also protect information which is important to our policy makers
either because they have it exclusively, or because it will be useful
only if no one suspects they have it. Preventing leaks is the
most serious challenge today in the intelligence profession.
We are asking the Congress to help us do this in three
areas. The Hughes-Ryan Amendment, enacted in 1974 requires that
anytime we are to undertake covert action, we must notify eight
committees of the Congress. That could be several hundred people
when you count the Congressional staffs. A covert action revealed
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to that many people may not deserve the title, covert. We are
asking to reduce that notification to the two committees that
exercise oversight over us and on which are represented members of
the other six committees. That way there would still be knowledge
of covert actions in those other committees when needed.
We are also asking for partial relief from the Freedom of
Information Act, by which you, the Russian Embassy, or anybody else
can ask us for information from our files. We must respond to all
these requests within ten days. It is an onerous problem, but
particularly with respect again to the perceptions of foreign
liaison services and foreign agents. It is difficult to persuade
someone to risk his life for you if he has heard there is a law
that may require me to reveal his name in public. We are very
willing to provide you any information we may have on you, and
to respond to inquiries about our product. We feel it is extremely
dangerous to require us to search highly sensitive operational
files in response to FOIA. Virtually no information from these
files is releasable even now, but the perception that it may be
inadvertently released is extremely harmful.
Lastly, we are asking for legislation to let us prosecute
people who traitoriously disclose the names of our officers and
agents around the world - people like Philip Agee. This is a real
problem for us. What Mr. Agee and people of his ilk are doing,
with acknowledged deliberateness, is to try to undermine this
organization which you pay for with your tax dollars, and which the
Congress has authorized. We must have some legislative way of
curtailing people who are deliberately trying to thwart the will of
the people and of the Congress by attempting to destroy an essential
activity of the United States of America.
Let me note to you that none of these three relief measures
I have just described constitute any great relaxation or setting
loose of the Central Intelligence Agency. They are simply moves
toward restoring a modicum of essential secrecy.
Yes, secrecy, any secrecy will always seem an anachronism
in America's open society. And, covert action will always conflict
with the American tradition of fair play. So, the country must
decide if it needs an intelligence activity. I personally believe
it clearly does. If so, carping at a reasonable level of secrecy
and reasonable freedom to use covert action against hostile
countries is unproductive and can be destructive. We, in the
intelligence profession, are well aware of the nation's standards
and your quite reasonable concern in these areas. We have no
intention of violating the trust that has been given to us to carry
out these delicate undertakings. We have no intention of undermining
the values of the society that we are here to defend. And, we do
not ask simply to be trusted. We strongly endorse continuing the
oversight process both in the Executive and Legislative Branches.
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Today we are poised at a balance point with three years
of successful experience behind us. We do not believe that we
can tip that balance any further in the direction of loosening our
controls over secrecy and still be able to function effectively as
a secret intelligence service. We do not ask to be unshackled. We
ask to be able to continue as we have over the past three years. I
know of no accusation of illegality, impropriety, or abuse, nor any
cause for such an accusation. I know of no inference that the
oversight process has not been thorough or effective during that
time.
So today we are on the verge of an exciting and important new
phase in American intelligence. We are constructing a uniquely
American model of intelligence tailored, to our society and our
concepts of the rights and privileges of the individual, but
tailored also to permit us to do what needs to be done to perserve
our national security. As we go forward in this, as we carry
this legislation through the Congress we need your understanding
and your support. I am grateful so many of you have chosen to
be us tonight. Thank you very much.