TRANSCRIPT OF DCI'S INTERVIEW WITH PETER MAAS PARADE MAGAZINE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-01448R000401670001-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 33
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 23, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: February 25, 1991
• Content Type: MISC

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TRANSCRIPT
OF
DCI'S INTERVIEW
WITH
PETER MARS
PARADE MAGAZINE
25 FEBRUARY 1991
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Q: I know you are busy, so I am not going to sit around and chat
with you, which I would like to do. The last time we had
more time. I was dust saying to Joe that the one problem you
don't have is that once the Agency tried to recruit me, and
it didn't work out, so you don't have to worry about me
screwing up something. So, shall we get right to it?
DCI: Did we not give you enough time?
D/PAO: Well, Peter Maas originally asked for about two hours sir,
but with the war going on, your time is pretty limited.
Q: I may want to do a follow-up, and I even got a new recorder,
so I will get right to it. Now, when I said before that you
take one tough fob after another, I wasn't kidding because
here we have Judge Webster post-Hoover, post-Casey, and
(inaudible) who was involved in both those cases. What's the
message here? I don't mean about you personally, but why is
there always this urgency to have someone like you who has to
step in? I would like your thoughts on that. Is it that the
institution still can't be designed; that it depends on
people?
DCI: Well, it depends on people, many of whom don't deserve a bad
rap and most of whom are completely deserving of the trust of
the American people. But, when an Agency goes through the
kind of severe scrutiny that often accompanies one of these
situations, like break-ins or the Iran-Contra, the oversight
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committees then, rightly or wrongly, begin to develop
reservations about the people who have come to testify --
questions of candor and completeness. So, there is a lot of
uncertainty about whether they need a change (inaudible) to
be sure that what they perceive are old problems and haven't
just been covered over and that they will be addressed.
Q: But, it's not just the oversight committees. I think the
country as a whole was, at the end of John Hoover's regime,
feeling a lot of controversy and certainly the same with
Casey. I am not passing a judgment on it, but suddenly in
both those instances, a Judge Webster was urgently needed,
somebody like a Judge Webster. Integrity seemed to be the
issue.
DCI: Well, I would use other adjectives like trust and
truthfulness. I think truthfulness builds trust, and if you
have a reputation or try to have a reputation of being
truthful in your dealings with other officlals who have a
right to know, trust begins to develop. Now, sometimes that
trust will be individual issues where that will come up and
settle down, but if you have a consistent pattern of being
truthful with those who have a right to know, then I think
you get an extension of trust. When you don't have trust --
I may not be saying this very well -- then the legislative
approach, at least, is to try to find ways to constrain you
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so that you are given, not dust guidelines, but statutes
and sometimes that is not a good idea for an Agency -- not
the best way to address a problem. It takes away the
flexibility and it puts the Agency on the defensive when you
may want an Agency that is capable of getting up and being
aggressive with logical guidelines and rules. So, what I
have tried to do -- not always successfully -- is to get the
Congress to let us demonstrate our trust-worthiness, rather
than to try and solve problems by writing laws.
Q: Of course, their answer is that they trust you -- that there
is going to be somebody after Judge Webster who might be
different.
DCI: There are ways to deal with that. When you have a President
who issues clear executive orders, which you are bound to
obey and to report any violations of to the Congress, or any
changes where the Congress is left in the dark about the
change, those are principles of oversight that can work and
they do work.
Q: Judge, let me ask you this. Do you have any concerns about
the image of the Agency or the public perception of it? To
elaborate -- I dust thought maybe bad factual press, say over
Contra, but, lets take the popular literature, the movies and
so on, with the exception of maybe Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan o~-
Buckley's Black Oats. Generally speaking, the Agency does not
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come out looking too good. Does that concern you? I mean,
it seems to me that they are on the moral level of the KGB or
worse. Does it concern you?
DCI: Well, it does to an extent. There are different kinds of
concern about the Agency and each one requires almost a
separate avenue of attention. One is how are we reviewed on
the campuses and other places where we look to recruit the
best and the brightest of the people to come and carry on the
tradition of this Agency and its mission. The other is how
we are portrayed generally in the public and whether we are
seen as a rogue elephant, a loose canon, outside the law --
all of those things which I think in a democratic society
make people feel trapped and worried about, particularly
where there is an overlay of secrecy and where they can't ask
the questions and get the answers. So there they look for
their surrogates in the Congress and other places to get
their answers. I think it is very important that we
demonstrate as much as we can our trust-worthiness and our
professional competence. The novels, the movies, and the
so-ons, I tend not to put as much weight on that as perhaps I
should because I think over time -- Hoover was very much into
that. He wanted books written, he wanted movies, he
supervised the script. And there you begin to create a kind
of fiction about what we really are if you are not careful.
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And, I think that since we often work in this area of
clandestine secrecy, the novelists tend to have afield day.
That's fine; I don't mind. The ones that I would like to
address are those who believe that we must be doing something
bad, and that could be a writer, a journalist, a novelist, or
somebody who sets out to do a work of non-fiction in which
their objective is to prove that we are doing something wrong.
Q: Well, when I brought up the popular area, it is because it is
like a message being delivered, where you develop a
mind-set. But, I am talking about the public now, and I am
not suggesting that the Agency should (inaudible), but there
must be a concern, it seems to me.
DCI: Let me tell you a story. I don't think I have told it
publicly, but I think illustrates it. My youngest daughter
was dust married a couple of years, living in New Jersey when
President Reagan called me and asked me to do this. I was
pretty much in my final year at the FBI. I had told the
Attorney General that I wanted to leave in that year so as
not to have the confirmation process appear during an
election year, and I was pretty far down the pike. Well,
when the President asked me to do it, I was about to go and
testify on the Hill, and I asked him to give me the
afternoon, the morning, a day at least to think about it,
pray about it, and talk to my family about it because they
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didn't think they were seeing enough of me. And, when I got
to my youngest daughter, she said, "Oh Dad, she said, I dust
love the idea. That other place is scary." And this is my
own daughter, the only one of my children who lived here at
all. It's the uncertainty in a free society about what goes
on in an organization that is essentially secret. Then too,
as you know, the FBI has had its share of glory and its share
of problems, but the glory can always offset the problems,
where in this Agency our best successes are the ones we try
to keep secret so we can keep on using the techniques and the
sources and the methods. So we tend to have our mistakes out
in the public domain without very much being told about our
mayor achievements. Now, what do you do about that? And, I
don't know that I have the answer, but I try, when I can, to
be out where those questions can be raised. I like to visit
a certain number of universities every year, where I expect
there have been demonstrations and other things, to meet with
people who think about world problems and the role of
intelligence, and helping our policymakers understand what's
going on in the world and meet with them and be accountable.
And I try to put up wherever we can the human side of this
Agency. Barbara Bush came over to dedicate our Day Care
Center, which is a state-of-the-art center for babies for
five months to five years, recognition of those who have
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given their lives, and there have been quite a few of those
-- those stars on the wall that you saw when you came in. It
helps people to understand that this is serious business and
our people are out there sometimes doing very dangerous
work. That tends to give people be a little more of a even
playing field. But mostly I have tried to outline the kinds
of accountability that we have which people don't realize.
The general guy in the public doesn't understand that we are
not only scrutinized by the White House and its agencies --
the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the
Intelligence Oversight Board -- but by a number of committees
of the Congress and four of whom see almost everything they
want to see about what we do. Then there is another aspect
of this and that's covert action. That's what most people
think we spend our lives doing.
Q: That's a small part, but it's the part that gets the
headlines.
DCI: It's the part that gets the headlines and where we get the
flack, but often people confuse policy, which is not ours to
make, with what we do to support the policy, and if they
don't like the policy, they are very apt to blame us because
we have been asked to be the front line for the
implementation of that policy. We have very clear --ules --
executive orders against assassination. We are not outside
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the law. Our law, even when we are operating overseas, our
law controls what we do. Obviously we can't be limited by
all the rules of the rest of the world, but our law controls
us, and people may not understand that, and they may think we
are out there doing things that we wouldn't be allowed to do
in this country, which is not true.
Q: So it is a concern, in effect.
DCI: It's a concern. It isn't a worry that we are losing the
battle; it's a concern that we must never forget that people
easily worry about things that they are not allowed to know
about and so you have to tell as much as you can. One way of
measuring it is recruiting, applications for recruitment and
that makes me feel very good. I am talking about
applications for employment in the Agency.
Q: Not dust this year when it's harder to get a fob, I
understand?
DCI: No, no. We have been running about a thousand a month, and
these are qualified applicants.
Q: Consistently?
DCI: Consistently!
Q: Well I asked that because the editors of PARADE wanted to
know if there was some concern about the message of the
Agency not getting across and so forth.
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DCI: I don't think we are concerned about the message not -- that
we have a message we are out there drum beating about --
I think that sometimes we are concerned that the thousands of
men and women who work here deserve to be respected. We can
tell a little bit about what they do and how well they do
it. We can a little bit about them. They are very normal
human beings. Most of them are gifted in one way or another,
but they are very normal human beings who, in many cases,
aren't allowed to represent the Agency in their own
community, but they need to know that the public knows that
we are on track and we are doing things we should be doing.
Q: Well a lot of things that makes the public uncomfortable --
and nothing has really happened during your tenure -- goes
back beyond before that. Anyway, the main theme of this is
espionage in the 90's, and I would like to ask you this. You
said, on more than one occasion last year or so, that there
is an apparent end to the Cold War -- the diminution, if not
the elimination of the Soviet threat. Do you still think, by
the way, that is the case?
DCI: What I said I standby in terms of the nature of the threat as
it existed before will not be the same again. I am talking
about the Soviet (inaudible) and the Warsaw Pact. The ground
war capability and that's a capability in Europe, and we a~~e
generally convinced that the Soviet Union is unlikely to
return to full-scale repression while Gorbachev is there.
But Gorbachev is facing very real problems.
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Q: So that is giving your reflection?
DCI: That is giving it plenty of reflection.
Q: I mean, what do you think -- there is a guy like Colonel
Victor (inaudible>; is that the way you pronounce it. And
his health, does that worry you?
DCI: In what way?
Q: In terms of the return -- of losing the (inaudible). He is
a powerful figure (inaudible).
DCI: Well, I think the general......
Q: Do you see him and his supporters back in power again?
DCI: Well, we don't see it in on our near-term screen, but what we
do see is a concern at the center for all of it, and a fear
that things have gotten out of control in the reformist
movement and while Gorbachev has tried to salvage his
economic problems, he is not making progress, real problems
that is economic growth is going down, he has had to confront
ethnic and national......
Q: Right, it is a time bomb!
DCI: And, as he has pushed this severity down, it is translating
itself into demands for autonomy of the Republic and we have
got, of course, Boris Yeltsyn and his very large following
directly confronting Gorbachev on a range of issues which is
something he didn't have to experience before.
Q: And you have this guy on the right.
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DCI: Aside from him, is Gorbachev turning more and more to the
army and to the KGB for his support and that broader than one
person. You don't do that without a price. There is no such
thing as a free lunch and that's where the risk that style of
dealing with the order question may only provoke further
instability in the Soviet Union.
Q: How serious do you think the threat is?
DCI: I think we think it's serious because the increased power on
the right means less reform and means less respect for human
rights in that effort and clearly already less for the
principle of Glastnost, the freedom of expression. So they
had a taste of that and they are not going to give it up
easily. So, we have a high potential for internal
instability and that's a lot different than starting a war.
Q: A civil war?
DCI: I don't -- that's a word you can use. It's a word I hate to
use because it's not defined. You can have a lot of civil
wars and that's a big country, it's an empire. You can have
some republics trying to follow the slow pattern of
succession, some looking for another kind of relationship,
clearly the union treaty is in doubt and you can have others
just walking away and saying what's going to happen. Look at
the states like Georgia, the Ukraine. You have the ethnic
ones down in the south, Azerbijan and Armenia, fighting each
other and talking about leaving. So, he has a lot of
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problems. They don't translate into war with the West, in my
view. There have been times in history when the way to get
out of a domestic problem is to go to war, but they really
lack the ability -- and I think the desire -- to engage in a
that kind of activity. Our warning period has indications in
warning for conventional warfare has broadened very
substantially, but if we want to see stability in the world,
we want to promote the reform that advances human rights and
democracy and right now there is a period where it's shifting
the other way in the interest of order.
Q: In the Soviet Union?
DCI: Yes.
Q: How about eastern Europe, what we used to call the Balkans?
DCI: If you talk about the northern tier, that's still pretty
exciting -- Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia -- they are all
working toward it. Particularly Poland who has gone way out
in taking big chances with major reform efforts that always
carry in its wake the pain of unemployment....
Q: But, they had a head start too.
DCI: They had a head start. There is a real desire -- 1 was over
there in November and had met with some of the folks from one
of the other countries I was in. I was in Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Turkey. They are confronting major
economic problems, they are going to depend on Western aid,
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they going to depend on the new relationship with the
European community and with Germany.
Q: You are talking about Poland?
OCI: No, I was primarily talking about Hungary and
Czechoslovakia. Poland too. Poland has not walked away from
its economic relationship with the Soviet Union, but all of
them have made clear delineations that they are no longer
their intelligence surrogates, they are no longer collecting
technology transfer for the Soviet Union. That's going to
cause some pain and much will depend on some outside support,
in my view. They are worried about the Soviet Union. They
are worried will the troops get out in time. They are
worried that perhaps the economic conditions in the Soviet
Union will slow down the movement of troops back and the
housing issues. They will be called upon to share in that
process. They worry about that and they worry about their
feeling those tensions and they worry about massive
immigration from the Soviet Union and that is something they
are really prepared to handle now as they are trying to get a
grip on the new market economy system. Now with the lower
group, they are moving much slower. I am talking about
Romania. They have a long way to come and it wouldn't take
too much --if their economy doesn't progress -- for' them to
receive some form of authoritarian government because they
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haven't had a lot of experience with democracy. I am not
talking about communism, just somebody who can stand up and
say I can take care of this.
Q: And then you have Yugoslavia -- but none of these places
there is no match, in your opinion, that's gonna blow up the
world like World War I?
DCI: No.
Q: Okay. So the Cold War as we have known it is pretty much
gone in the old sense of the word, and you have talked about
the future in the 90's, what do you see as the intelligence
priorities? I would like you to be as specific as you can,
and is that why you set up the Directorate of Planning and
Coordination?
DCI: Yes, because there is more to this than just identifying the
priorities and how to get there. The Soviet Union will still
be an important area of interest for the United States in
terms of intelligence. More and more, we have tried to have
an encyclopedic understanding of the world rather than the
very parochial intelligence that we had at the beginning of
World War I or World War II for that matter. The Soviet
Union and/or its problems will have impact on us economically
and politically, so we got to continue to watch it but in
somewhat different ways, not as the east/west military
threat. Eastern Europe is developing and we've got to see
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how they are developing and provide information that will
help our policy writers further democratic needs. But what
has happened around the world that was reasonably predictable
and was predicted and we are seeing it happen, is that with
the end of the Cold War which I call the polarization from
east and west, we now find regional conflicts and regional
disputes, regional problems emerging all over the world. For
whatever reason, that previous east/west confrontation
covered up a lot of those, held them back. Now people are
expressing it. Even in those new democracies....
Q: Right, absolutely, there is a of tribal
DCI: You bet, call it whatever you want, but it's there and there
will be a lot of ,jobs. As in the African Continent, you have
democracies that have come up under a slightly different
tradition, a single party tradition and South Africa trying
to restore itself in the government of nations. You could
take almost any (inaudible) where Third World countries have
developed the beginnings of industrial capability or more --
rivalries have come. Take India and Pakistan. They were
drifting into war this time last year and a series of
governmental changes and other reasons have put that off, but
that problem remains.
Q: Is there any particular part of the world, aside from tl~e
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Gulf, you see as a particular threat to the (inaudible)?
DCI: Let me name three or four of them because that is the problem
of the intelligence in the 90's. We are not going to say we
go from one to here. We may find ourselves with two or even
three potential world crises developing or at least regional
ones that have implications to the United States. I think
that is what's taking place in the Pacific rim, particularly
the relations between South Korea and North Korea presents
potential -- it could improve or it could go backwards.
Q: If it went backwards, what would happen?
DCI: Well, of course, we have a military commitment and we still
believe South Korea is vital to our national interests.
Q: It is conceivable to think that the North Koreans would try
to come in again?
DCI: It is not inconceivable. They are having a change in
leadership over there right now so there is less certainty.
You have the democracies in Latin America and we have had a
mayor turn toward democracy but many of them are having
problems getting their coalition reconciliation governments
to function properly. You can see that in E1 Salvador; we
still have the FLMN there. You see the problems in Nicaragua
where the Sandinistas still control the military and create
uncertainties with Mrs. Chomorro. Mexico leas economic
problems that Salinas is working mightily to solve, but
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they have become one of the avenues of the (inaudible) coming
up from (inaudible) and other places. I don't see Mexico
tipping, but I think it is very important for us to
understand what is taking place there. If you take some of
the areas, old hot spots, are either burning out or slowing
down....
Q: Southeast Asia?
DCI: Southeast Asia -- we haven't done and ......the countries
that have tried to influence the outcome of Cambodia have not
been successful other than to get Vietnam out of there which
was a very important achievement, but it's still has
potential. Another coup in Thailand over the weekend.
Q: We're worried about the Khmer Rouge. I never could
understand why we were (inaudible>. I don't think a lot of
people do, if they think about it.
DCI: Well, it becomes a political problem. The problem there that
we have is that the people we support are on the same basic
side as people we oppose. Avery strange set of
relationships and it's hard to fish them out. Afghanistan
continues to go on as before. Angola is slowing coming to a
solution. I think we are going to see a series of countries
confronting coups, perhaps not as violently, the same way as
Liberia on the African Continent. The Middle East stays with
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Q: Is fair to say in the 90's you don't see another whatever
region of the world a Saddam Husayn causing us some
problems. Is there a potential for another one like this?
DCI: You asked about our priorities in the 90's. I have been
talking about regional. Another priority is the
proliferation of missiles -- nuclear and chemical and
biological warfare -- where the by-product of all these wars
since World War II in that there is a huge arms market,
secondary, secondhand, new and some of these countries with a
little bit of wealth have been accumulating weapons and are
becoming disproportionate in power to other countries in the
region. Others are less responsible. They are not
participating in the United Nations pacts and (inaudible>.
All of that means is that you can't say, no another Saddam
Husayn is unlikely. If we learned some lessons in this
process of the Gulf is that we have to act quickly and act
when we see seminal problems of this kind and we also have to
recognize that one day's friend can be tomorrow's enemy.
Q: What can you do about the build-up of chemical and nuclear?
DCI: Well, it's a very tough question.
Q: Look at Pakistan -- there is nothing you can do to stop it.
DCI: From the standpoint of intelligence which is our primary
source rather than policy, you have to ask yourself, how well
can we enforce conventions and treaties and on nuclear or
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chemical proliferation. Chemicals create a problem because
production plants look very much like fertilizer plants or
pharmacies and so on. It is very difficult. You need good
intelligence in order to be reasonably confident that
somebody is breaking whatever rules and so that's going to be
an important part of our job. Getting people to commit to
the destruction of these weapons of mass destruction.
Q: That's something you and the Oval office is going to have to
handle.
DCI: But, just like arms control, you have to say, now how can we
be sure that they are doing it.
Q: Okay. Now, how do you go about revamping the Agency to meet
these new priorities? I mean it is a pretty awesome task.
What do you do? Shift personnel. Do you bring in new
personnel. You have terrible budget limitations right now.
I mean the general feeling is that 50 percent of your efforts
were devoted to Soviet military. Now do you take people who
are spending twenty years, do you let them go, do you bring
in new people, what do you do?
DCI: We are finding that most of the shifts can be accommodated
within the Agency by retraining in those areas where
retraining is necessary. Language skills for instance. We
are putting a much heavier empV~asis on language, not just for-
human intelligence, but for the people who have to analyze...
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Q: And this is teaching people as opposed to recruiting people
who speak Arabic or whatever?
DCI: We are looking -- of course, that's one of the skills that we
look for in people that we are bringing in. We have
immersion training; we have a whole range of programs for
language.
Q: So your thrust is retraining in terms of reallocating because
you have a finite number of resources, you have to replace
them with other people which is one option or try to retrain
them.
DCI: Some of this goes on beyond the Agency. It goes for the
whole Intelligence Community.
Q: I will get to that in a minute.
DCI: The reason I say that is, some of the national technical
collection was designed primarily with the Soviet Union in
mind. We have been adapting the existing national technical
collection, the assets, the imagery, the SIGINT, etc., to new
roles and new responsibilities dust as we have pulled a lot
of things into the Gulf. That hasn't been easy, but in terms
of priorities for the 90's, we have been using flexibility as
our main guidelines. We are trying to make sure that the
assets that we acquire for future support of what we do here
can be readily adapted to a range of places and types of
collection.
Q: But that's in the future, but you have got an agency that
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in the last 35 or 40 years is really been pointed in one way.
DCI: Well, I am trying not to get technical.
Q: You say you think can make this retraining because what I am
getting to is, of course, it takes somebody like Senator
Bourne, he is a fan of yours which I think is -- you know I
was saying to Joe earlier, it's a little different when we
say the Church Committee which is aggressively hostile and
critical and Bourne is a fan of yours.
DCI: We have tried to work together. Our missions -- well he has
an oversight responsibility -- he wants us to succeed.
Q: That's my point. So, when I speak to him, which I have, I
take him seriously because he is not wild-eyed about
anything. He is certainly not a fanatic and he, as you now,
wants a complete reorganization of the Intelligence Community.
DCI: Well, that may come.
Q: And assuming you disagree, how you do you answer or maybe you
don't.
DCI: That's a bigger question than the one I was just trying to
answer. What I was saying was we will be hiring and we have
been given new positions in certain parts, particularly in
human intelligence and we will be drawing on skills and
assets wherever we think we need strengthening, so it isn't
that we are just going to shuffle what we have. We a~~e
looking for more. I don't think that in our present posture
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that this represents any wholesale or even any loss of
personnel where we say we may find ourselves in the defense
scheme when our budget is in (inaudible) and we,may find
ourselves taking substantial reductions as we get into a more
peaceful environment. But, we can handle, I think, most of
that through attrition rather than slicing off an arm and a
leg in order to maintain the deficit.
Q: Or to bring in new people. What do you think about Bourne
saying, he wants
DCI: What he wants to do, as I understand it, is to take a
careful, fully considered look at how we do this very
complex community business and see if there is anything that
can be done to improve it or change it. If in after that
kind of review, its clear that there is a more effective way
-- the community is a complicated thing because in the first
place the Director of Central Intelligence has certain
overall responsibilities, including the budget.
Q: That's right, you preside over the Intelligence Community.
DCI: I preside and that's probably a pretty good word because the
report cards are written elsewhere and a good part of the
community, NSA, DIA, the services inside the Defense
establishment, State Department has INR, representatives from
Energy, from Treasury, from Justice, the FBI, so we have a
system in which I have a special authorities, I have special
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responsibilities and they go back home do these
responsibilities elsewhere and to make it work involves a
word that isn't generally understood by the public, but it's
inside the bureaucracy; it's coordination. And you can
coordinate through a series of working groups and in the end
it's the leaders of these agencies who will or will not
coordinate and cooperate to make things happen. And I think
we are at a pretty high level of desire right now, that is, I
can't identify anybody in the community whose stiffing our
efforts to achieve our end goal. In otherwards, our strategy
is in place; the question is how to get there with the amount
of money that's going to be available, and it is not so much
pulling on turf when the last time around when we knew we
were going to have to look for ways to take less money, we
worked together to say what can we give up and still pursue
this strategy. Not, here is your pro-rata share.
Q: You don't think any of your sister intelligence agencies -- I
am not out to, I am not even going to ask you to comment on
that because I know that they are so that gets back to what
Bourne says. You know, I think he is really serious. He's
got two years to go and he wants to leave a real mark....
DCI: I believe he will, but he won't construct something just to
have a mark.
Q: Well, he believes that, well I think he has decided that
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he is right. I can't speak for him but that is my
impression. I think he wants to merge the CIA and the DIA
for one thing and he says the DIA tries to cut you nine ways
to Sunday and he doesn't understand why they can't be merged
with one guy put on the top and then he says NSA was not even
created when the Agency was formed and he wants the national
director at the top. I am sure that if this happened in the
next couple of years, he would say you would be the guy.
DCI: I was US Attorney General under Eisenhower and I watched DEA
go through a thousand reorganizations. You develop a kind of
sense of insecurity after a while and you begin to hang on be
suspicious of what the other people are doing. I suppose
over time the Central Intelligence Agency is the Central
Intelligence Agency. It's been the dominant means of
collection and analysis.
Q: Can people in America, right or wrong even though the
Intelligence Community is quite large, when you say espionage
or intelligence in America, everybody thinks CIA. Can't get
away from that.
DCI: Then that creates a kind of counter-ripple from other
agencies who are sister agencies and what I have been working
hard to do is to overcome natural tendencies and to give our
directors of the other agencies the opportunity to
participate with me. We meet twice a week, incidentally,
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on an informal basis, have lunch. And, we don't meet here
except when its our turn. We meet all over......
Q: Is that right? I though you always meet here.
DC1: Oh no. Each time there is a host and I think that that has
been helpful. We got these centers that I put in place which
we call DCI centers. We have taken some of the key
priorities for the future that are new priorities; counter-
terrorism, counterintelligence and counternarcotics.
Q: I want to get to that later.
DCI: But I am saying that this is a way, a vehicle in trying to
get the Community to (inaudible), and it is an art form
because, as you point out and as I mentioned earlier, they
come from different places to serve a common mission, but
each one is a little different and each one has certain
things they do for their own constituency and so you got to
preserve their identities and have their special things to do
for their own people and at the same time contribute to our
general understanding of the problem.
Q: Well Bourne says, or I am speaking for him so I will
paraphrase, that you set up these various things which are
terrific, but you may leave and someone else comes and they
say why do we want those.
DCI: That's a risk.
q; In this reorganization, what's your position? Are you
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dead set against it or are you willing to look?
DCI: I am absolutely to look along with everyone else at every
other kind of way to making it work better. I come to it
with a basic bias, which may or may not be right. Just as I
wasn't in favor of the statutory Inspector General. But that
is just an example of we where we are making that work now.
I think I am entitled to an opinion, but it isn't necessarily
the one or even the right one, and in this particular thing,
the one nagging concern that I have is that an organizational
head who has no troops is apt to have trouble making things
happen. And I think that the drug czar has experienced some
of those problems. So, you can conceive of an organization
that merges all of the intelligence and analyzes it, that's a
possibility. But as far as actually directing it and
controlling it and making sure that clandestine human
intelligence is out there functioning, doing the things that
we do on a daily basis, that's a little hard to do off in a
suite of offices somewhere. And so, I don't know, maybe
someone can design an architecture for us better than the
ones we have.
What other things that they bring up is, and when I say they,
I am not talking about Bou--ne anymore, but two or three othe~~
sources I consider pretty reliable. Thei~? attitude is,
again, I don't know, you don't have to comment on this pa~?t
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of it, the DIA will always say you never supply with military
with what they want to know, which is how wide the highway
is, how many trains will enter the station, etc. And the
example they use is they all say the Agency was cut out of
the Panama invasion and that a lot of assets were lost. The
chief of station down there, they say, but basically the
Agency was cut out of the loop and maybe a lot of assets that
could have been used were lost. And those are people who are
on your side.
DCI: I would rather not comment too much on that. It was viewed
as a military operation and we were very busy during that
time, and, I know from my own experience of involvement, we
were supplying exceptionally important intelligence to them
and over a period of time added -- it is really not correct
to say that we were cut out of the operation -- but there is
a tendency when the military takes over, take over
completely. Well I see that in the agreements that are
signed on terrorism out of control in the United States. The
military does (inaudible) and when its asked to do it wants
to do it all. But, we should have -- maybe there's lesson
learned if there was -- because the opposite of that is the
current Gulf situation where we have people in place over at
the highest levels of the JIC where we are collecting all the
intelligence and the important information,
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although it may be closely held is coming to me, is coming to
my deputy, and we know what additional work we need to do.
They came over and briefed me yesterday on what's going on
and we are not privy to the tactical stuff and what you are
talking about comes awfully close to that where we lack the
manpower and don't have that kind of information or even the
objective. At one time, there were some up on the Hill who
wanted to take the military out of collecting that kind of
information completely for other reasons. But the facts of
life are that we could not have handled that kind of
responsibility on our resources and so we supported the
continued collection.
Q: Of course, they keeping going with the budget overlapping
duplication and the argument is that they could be merged and
one guy could (inaudible).
DCI: But I think that those are things that ought to be optimally
looked at, and looked at carefully.
Q: I am going to bring up a couple of critical points. These
are things that people have raised or they are going to raise
and one of them involves the Gulf, and again, this is a
complaint of Bourne's too, that because of the Cold War
mind-set, there has been a lack of long-range strategic
intelligence and one of the examples that they, not he alone
but elsewhere too, just about a year ago, you testified
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before the Armed Services Committee and Intelligence too, and
getting your global view of things with the Agency, not
yours, and when you got to Middle East Iraq wasn't even
mentioned.
DCI: I guess that's right. I don't remember -- I remember some of
the things I talked about.
Q: You talked about Iran, you talked about Syria, you talked
about terrorism, you talked about Israel and the Arabs.
DCI: That's probably true. That's a fair comment.
q; I mentioned to Joe earlier that someone reminded me that
almost a year and a half ago Schwartzkopf was here testifying
and they said well what's the biggest danger and he says the
biggest danger I am facing is the million-man Iraqi army dust
across the way and nothing seemed to happen. The White House
didn't seem to respond to it. What? Of course, the critics
of the Agency blamed this on the fact that you are still
looking toward Moscow.
DCI: I don't think it was that we were still looking towards
Moscow. I think that the Community assessment, not dust the
Agency, the NFIB, we all sat down and all signed off on
something a year ago September was that Saddam Husayn was
going to be a big bully in the neighborhood and we intended
to achieve dominance, but that he had taken on so much water,
hits, it would take him up to three years to get ready, and
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in retrospect we could go back and say perhaps we didn't
estimate how easy it would be to reach out and grab Kuwait,
nor did we see any sign that he was ready. When we began
seeing signs of military activity a couple of months later
after I testified, was it March/April or June or July, wasn't
it, and then we were able at that point to shift a lot of
assets and began getting very good information about the
number of troops moving, what they were doing, where the SCUD
launchers were, and we had them on the border and we gave
them our best judgment which was that they were going to
attack.
Q: Right. All the critics say DIA was forty-five days ahead
which they thought was dust as bad too.
DCI: I am not even sure that's true, but the actual judgment that
he was going to do it - I remember talking to Henry Kissinger
about Tienamen Square -- and he said you can't know it until
Dong Sho Ping knows it. But, there is -- I am not trying to
defend it --
Q: No, I think you are being very good about it, as a matter of
fact, when you say you are not perfect.
DCI: We really aren't perfect in these things and Iraq is an
unusually denied country. Total dictatorship, no dissent
tolerated of any kind -- either you qet kicked out or you get
killed -- and so developing eyes and ears in that kind of
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a world where military leaders are executed at the drop of a
hat, or ask the wrong question, very difficult (end one side)
(inaudible) and we were able to assess what would happen if
he would keep on going in terms of that part of the world and
what that mean not only to countries and their legitimacy in
that area, but also to the economic problems in the world
with a domination of world central place for.....
Q: It doesn't matter any more now, did you think your evidence
was gonna or was a possibility?
DCI: A very real possibility and our evidence -- to take a slice
off of Saudi Arabia where the oilfields were. One also has
to consider too that as we are supplying this information, we
are supplying it at a time when there was no military
capability (inaudible). We had no landing rights in Saudi
Arabia, we had no mayor military forces within range, and no
conscious decision had been made to do anything about Kuwait.
Q: So what you are saying is that your passing this stuff onto
the Saudis changed any reservations about inviting us in?
DCI: No. No, I am saying that intelligence does not always
translate into action and action is not at that time
possible. The combination of the threat to Saudi Arabia,
which more closely is identified with our vital national
interests, galvanized a policy decision to stop it. Tlie
intelligence helped convince the Saudis, Dick Cheney I~elped
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convince the Saudis that we had the resolve. Airplanes come
and they fly away, but coming over there with a full force
made the difference. Additional priorities are: drugs,
counterintelligence, economic competitiveness, terrorism as
important (inaudible -- Judge getting ready to leave). So we
are seeing a world, not only on CNN, but we are seeing a
world (tape goes dead>.
~~
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