REMARKS BY WILLIAM H. WEBSTER DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE BEFORE THE PHOENIX ROTARY CLUB PHOENIX, ARIZONA JANUARY 15, 1988

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00777R000301900001-1
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 12
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 29, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: January 15, 1988
• Content Type: REPORT

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REMARKS
BY
WILLIAM H. WEBSTER
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
BEFORE THE
PHOENIX ROTARY CLUB
PHOENIX, ARIZONA
JANUARY 15, 1988
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I wanted to talk to you a little bit today about what goes on in the
Intelligence Community, what we are trying to do, and how we are trying to do
it consistent with the demands of a free society which puts us in a rather
special category. And it is one, that we don't often have an opportunity to
explain in detail. In fact there are many things I would like to tell you
today that obviously I cannot. Someone gave me a button not long ago; I
should have brought it along. It says: "My job is so secret that even I
don't know what I'm doing." That is part of the problem, of course. In a
society such as ours, secrecy raises elements of suspicion and distrust. The
Orwellian theory of what's going on there, the possibility that we may be
covering something that we shouldn't be doing under the guise of secrecy --
and we in the United States have had a track record where various agencies
have indeed overclassified and fallen back under the cloak of secrecy. And
yet I want to make, if I can, the obvious case for secrecy and tell you how we
are operating within that framework.
The year that just ended has been a very busy and demanding year, quite
aside from all the Iran-Contra hearings and all the questions that were raised
at that time. Other things of importance have been going on in the world that
affect us all. It is very important that somebody understands and can advise
and predict for the policymakers of this country so that they can in turn make
wise decisions about our involvement, our participation,.and our policy
positions.
When we think about, and have thought about, Latin America with the
problems in El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti; and moving around in other
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directions, in Moscow -- our embassy problem and our. relationships with the
new Gorbachev perestroika and glasnost; the-.problems in Africa with Angola,
Chad, Mozambique -- major problems that started this year; and they have been
dynamically followed by problems in the Persian Gulf, the war in Afghanistan,
the problems of nuclear development in India and Pakistan, the crisis in the
Philippines, the elections in Korea, the visit of the new Japanese prime
minister, the death of Taiwan's president, and our relationship with the
People's Republic of China. This is just to mention a few issues and to get
your thinking clear on the importance of our understanding, as best we can,
and with every resource that is available to us, what is happening in the
world in order that those to whom we have entrusted our leadership can make
wise and sound decisions.
I am not a policymaker and CIA is not engaged in policymaking. That is an
important point for me to remember and for all of you to remember. But if I
were a policymaker, I would not want research papers, but I would want
national estimates prepared for use that are helpful, not simply giving the
kind of regurgitation of information that is available in the common
libraries. We have within the Intelligence Community and particularly within
the Central Intelligence Agency vast human and technical collection capability
-- both human resources around the world and satellites in the sky. And we
have within the Agency an enormous pool of dedicated, talented, and gifted
Americans -- the functional equivalent of a great American university. The
problem, the test, is to make the maximum and most effective use of those
resources consistent with the kind of society that we have.
I'm not going, because of the time allowed, to'tell you all of the things
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that we do to assure ourselves that the information is useful. The terms of
reference that we prove, the terms of studies have a lot to do with this, but
so I think do the weekly meetings that I have separately with the adviser to
the President on national security, lunch with the Secretary of State,
breakfast with the Secretary of Defense, and many others to be sure that we
are in tune with their needs -- all go into the process of being useful.
We have to understand, in a very large sense, what is going on in terms of
arms production and arms usage. In my litany I gave you a little earlier I
should have included arms control because it is one of the most important
things we are working on at the present time. We need to know both the
capabilities and the intentions of our adversaries. That information cannot
wait too long. I visited NORAD, some of you may have been there yourselves,
the Cheyenne Mountains, in Colorado, one of the most important centers of our
early warning systems where it became abundantly clear that we don't deal any
more in terms of years, or weeks, or days, but often in terms of minutes in
which to make a decision about whether something that has been launched
represents a direct threat to the security of this country calling for a
cataclysmic response.
In addition to being useful and timely, it is very important that our work
product not only be objective but be seen to be objective., All last year we
heard reports, accusations, and innuendos that somebody was "cooking the
books" to favor a particular line of policy that those in the Intelligence
Community wanted to see happen. I don't think this is factually accurate, but
I have put in place a number of procedures. I will not detail these
procedures now, but they are designed not only to satisfy the policymakers of
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the objectivity of our work, but to assure and satisfy those gifted people I
mentioned earlier who produce the national estimates that they are allowed to
produce their opinions and their views within a framework in which we are not
trying to influence or shape their outcome. We want to call it the way that
it is. And I have made it very clear to the policymakers that, in turn, they
may use it any way they want. They may use it in its entirety, they may use
it in part, they may ignore it, they may tear it up and throw it away, but
they may not change it. It stands as the record of our Intelligence Community
assessment and it will be there for history to judge.
We had that problem in a small way in the Persian Gulf, when the
policymakers got ahead of the Intelligence Community in making certain
decisions, including the flagging of tankers without knowing what all of the
implications of their actions were, according to our own best estimates. And
there was some grousing that perhaps they ought to be allowed to have
something to say about how that assessment worked. It might actually
implicate the War Powers Act or some other thing. We made it very clear that
our estimates would be the best we could produce. They would not for any
political reason, or policy reason, be changed. And I think it's a healthy
relationship now between what we do and what they do. And I think that that
relationship may very well be, in the final analysis, the most important
contribution that I could make in galvanizing a .cohesive Intelligence
Community without compromising the integrity of the individual analysts or the
program managers.
All of you I'm sure appreciate-the need for secrecy in much of what we
do. The two key words that have come to be very important to me, and more so
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than in any past experience I've had -- we certainly were aware of them at the
FBI -- are sources and methods. If we do not have sources around the world
willing to tell us information that we need, because they fear that their
identity will be revealed by one process or another -- whether it is public
congressional inquiries or leaking to the press or by any other means -- we're
not going to have those sources, and we're not going to have that
information. If we cannot develop our most sophisticated technology for
gathering information -- whether it's signals intelligence,. communications
intelligence, imagery intelligence of photographs we take from the sky --
we're not going to have the methods because our adversaries will devise and
have devised the means to frustrate the methods that have become so successful
for us.
And so, while we need to protect sources and methods, we have to find a
way consistent with that need for secrecy to demonstrate that we are
accountable, and to find methods of being accountable that build, rather than
erode, trust with those who have the oversight responsibility for our work,
particularly the Congress.
I want to talk to you about covert action, a term that became almost a
household term during the past year. It is an activity that has been assigned
to us and accounts for less than three percent of our resources but which
attracts the most heat, the most confusion, and generates the most ill ease
and suspicion. Covert action is what it says -- it is action that is not
intended to be made public. But what it is, primarily, is political work
through communications, through training of people in other countries,
providing supplies, giving advice. The purpose of covert action is to
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implement foreign policy -- our foreign policy,'our national policy, not the
foreign policy of the CIA or any other internal group, but the declared policy
of this country. And we do it because there are many countries in the world
whose leaders need and want our help, but for political reasons and other
legitimate appropriate reasons cannot have our participation known at the risk
of destabilizing their countries. There are also emerging democratic forces
around the world that need our support, and our State Department and our
President have taken positions to support those democratically oriented
organizations -- insurgencies which are fighting for the opportunity for
freedom in their country. And obviously, our participation in support of
those agencies must be done clandestinely.
The statutes and the regulations define covert action as activities
conducted in such a way that the role of the United States Government is not
apparent. From President Franklin Delano Roosevelt forward, in my lifetime
every single President has endorsed and used covert action. How we use it, of
course, becomes vitally important.
I hope that you will not associate the problems of Iran-Contra with covert
action generally. The problem there was that a non-intelligence agency, the
National Security Council, slowly and through understandable error became an
operational center for the release of hostages and the development of
initiatives looking for people in Iran after Khomeini. Orders were issued out
of the National Security Council that, in my view, should not have come from
there because they were operational. The National Security Council is
designed to coalesce and coordinate policy options for the President to
decide, not to engage in operational activities. They did not understand and
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were not subject to the constraints that would have worked within the Central
Intelligence Agency. That whole situation was described as a government
without rules inside a government that did not know, and it must not happen
again. Fortunately, the President and the national security adviser at the
time made it very clear that the National Security Council was out of the
operations business, and it now falls back to those of us who are disciplined
to understand the constraints under which we must operate.
I came to this job bringing with me two cardinal theses that I developed
in my own mind both on the bench and with the FBI. And they are that
intelligence activities must be conducted lawfully and with absolute fidelity
to our Constitution and to our laws; and that there must be a trustworthy
system of oversight which builds, rather than erodes, trust and confidence.
Today, most proposals for covert activities are advanced because the State
Department or the Department of Defense or some other policymaking
organization has come to us for help. When a proposal emerges, it must pass
through a strict screening process in the Central Intelligence Agency,
ultimately going to a group of senior managers known as the CARG, the Covert
Action Review Group, which examines the proposal not only in terms of its
management problems, but also asks itself these questions: is it consistent
with overt United States foreign policy? Remember, this was one of the
problems in Iran-Contra. Is it consistent with American values? Will it make
sense to the American people when-it becomes public? And will it work? I
think this kind of scrutiny assures a more effective and productive use of our
covert activity.
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And then I present the same kinds of questions in our presentation to the
National Security Council for the National Security Council Planning Group,
with the heads of our major departments -- Defense, State, Treasury,
Justice -- the President, and the Vice President, in attendance, so that they
too have to ask themselves these questions. And then, the President himself
makes a formal finding that the covert action is necessary for our national
security.
Not only do we have internally the means of presenting a logical approach
to covert action, but we must follow a line of rules established by the
President and his National Security Decision Directive -- NSDD -- and also by
a series of laws going back to 1976 and 1977 when Congress undertook to
exercise oversight responsibility of the Intelligence Community. The
Intelligence Community is required by law to keep both of the intelligence
committees fully and currently informed of all intelligence activities. When
something is unusually sensitive, we can do this by reporting to what we call
the "Gang of Eight," which is the chairman and vice chairman of both
committees in the House'and Senate, and the Majority Leader and Minority
Leader, and so on. They can then be the surrogates for the balance of the
Congress on these more sensitive matters.
The law requires that the intelligence committees be kept informed on a
timely basis. This year we are going through a kind of debate over whether
there are any exceptions to immediate or prompt notice. There is a bill in
Congress now to require notice within 48 hours. The. President's NSDD requires
notice within 48 hours of any finding. that he makes except in those
extraordinarily rare circumstances where he may determine that for reasons of
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life-threatening situations he would defer it. But he cannot defer it for
more than 10 days without reexamining his position -- in my view, a very
logical approach to make sure that a decision is not made, as it was in
Iran-Contra, not to tell the Congress and then put the finding on the shelf
and not examine it again for 18 months. Every 10 days, that issue comes back
to the President. I hope that in the ongoing legislation, efforts that will
in any way restrict our ability to function in confidence, in protecting the
lives that are involved, will give way to the more sane and rational approach
that the President has committed himself to through a public document.
If these rules are all in place, and they are being scrupulously followed,
I have taken the position that in dealing with the Congress, as distinguished
from the use of deception in intelligence activities abroad, there is no
excuse for deception of any kind. There will be occasions when, for reasons I
have outlined to you, I will not want our people to divulge vital and secret
information that exposes unnecessary risk to the projects or the individuals
involved. But in those situations, and I have done this, I have told the
Congress that I have an answer but I do not want to give it, and I have
outlined the reasons. That gives those on the intelligence committees an
opportunity to increase their heat on me if they think I'm wrong, to discuss
it further with me, to negotiate and find a way to satisfy them that they are
carrying out their oversight responsibilities without putting to unnecessary
risk the projects or the people involved. But never will we answer obliquely
or disingenuously or treat the question so narrowly that one can't have an
answer that does not inform the Congress and pretend that we have answered the
question. It is very, very important that through this level of candor,
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without giving up our sources and methods, we can indeed build rather than
erode trust.
I think there is a limit to legislation in accomplishing missions of this
kind which depend upon character. Trust in verification is the President's
motto in arms control. And something very like it is true as we approach the
difficult problem of making sure that we continue to build intelligence
capability around the world, and at the same time demonstrate that we are
accountable under our laws to those who have the responsibility for what we do.
An old friend of mine, Sir William Stephenson, 92 years old today, living
in Bermuda, was the subject of a book a few years ago called A Man Called
Intrepid. He didn't write the book but he wrote a foreword to the book, and
in that foreword he said this: "Perhaps a day will dawn when tyrants can no
longer threaten the liberty of any people. When the function of all people,
however varied their ideologies, will be to enhance life not to control it.
If such a condition is possible, it is in a future too far distant to
foresee. Until that safer, better day, the democracies will avoid disaster
and possible total destruction only by maintaining their defenses. Among the
increasingly intricate arsenals across the world, intelligence is an essential
weapon. (This is the man who helped break the code, the German code, and did
so much during World War II.) Intelligence is an essential weapon. Perhaps
the most important. But it is, being secret, the most dangerous. Safeguards
to prevent its abuse must be devised, revised, and rigidly applied. But as
in all enterprise, the character and wisdom of those to whom it is entrusted
will be decisive. In the integrity of that guardianship lies the hope of free
people to endure and prevail."
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It seems to me a nation dedicated to the rule of law can protect itself
and its heritage in no other way.
Thank you.
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