GEORGE BUSH ADDRESS TO HOUSTON YMCA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-01448R000502250004-1
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 10
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: April 26, 2012
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: May 7, 1976
• Content Type: MISC

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11 George Bush
Ll
Address to Houston YMCA
LI May 0, 1976
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GEORGE BUSH: Thank you, Ed, for that very warm introduc-
tion, and I really can't tell you how pleased Barbara and I are to
be home in Houston. It's not that I'm -- it's not just that I'm
glad to be out of, Washington. I'm delighted, really, to be back,
the first time that we've had a chance to be in our hometown since
we left for Peking in the fall of 1974.
I feel at home here. I believe in the work of the YMCA.
I was active in Midland, Texas in the founding of the Y out there,
I've participated here. I can attest that what Ed told you is
true about Carl Walker. Riding along, minding my own business
in the Forbidden City in downtown Peking, and the messenger hands
you a note: "Your a month behind payment for the Century Club in
the South-central Branch of the Houston YMCA." I think that's
going a little far. But we've got a place for Carl in our organi-
zation, I think.
It's kind of like the guy -- when Barbara and I were up
and living in splendor as your representative at the United Nations,
living high atop the Waldorf Hotel in 42A, which is the Embassy of
the United States to the United Nations. Came out, saw this guy
dragging a mongrel dog along, right across from 50th Street there,
heading over towards Madison Square Garden.
I said, "Where you going with the dog?"
He said, "Well, I'm taking him over,to enter him in the
pet show in Madison Square Garden."
I said, "Well, that's the world champion show. Do you
think he's going to win anything?"
He said, "No, I don't expect he's going to win anything,
but he's going to be in some damn fine company."
And that's the way I feel about being here tonight. A
lot of people from the Y, a lot of people from the Breakfast Club
that I used to attend with great regularity and affection, and I
do feel at home here. And somebody at a press conference, you
know, asked me the inevitable question this evening about: "Well,
what 'II you do if the President or the next President or the pre-
sent President doesn't want you to continue in what you're doing?"
I said, "Well, I'll do what anybody else does that's
appointed to serve at the pleasure of the President. Whether this
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President's elected or another President's elected, I'll submit
my resignation; and if he accepts it, I'll be very happy, 'cause
I'll move back here to Sage Road and go to work for Carl Walker,
and I think we'll have a good -- good -- good life." And I
really mean that.
And so, I am very pleased to be here tonight. I want to
talk to you a little bit about the Central Intelligence Agency.
It's not altogether unrelated to YMCA work, and I'll try to make
that point later. But I'd like to talk to you about it as it is,
not as people sometimes think it is. I real all kinds of stories
about stuff that the Central Intelligence Agency is involved in,
and I immediately go to my office, a very efficient one: "Please
check this out."
Now, with me tonight is one of our press officers, and
he gets many more of these stories than I get, and he was telling
me about one that is really true -- the story is true; the facts
are not -- about what we were blamed for. He got a frantic call
from the West, and they said, "We would like you to verify this
story about the Central Intelligence Agency. We're very upset
about it."
you?"
And our man said, "Well, yes, sir. What can I do for
He said, "Well, we understand that three humanoids landed
in the desert in Nevada and that they were met there by a CIA
agent who took them to Elgin [sic] Air Force Base, where they were
frozen and put on ice. And they got unfrozen three days later and
died.
"Now, did you or did you not do this?"
Mr. Perrin said, "No, we did not freeze three humanoids."
But then the question is, you know, "Well, did they land in
the desert?" And we end up going through all kinds of peculiar
things.
There was another guy -- and these are true stories -- that
was making $150 a lecture, lecturing on the West Coast, advertising
himself as a former hired killer for.the CIA. And he went on to
tell about a real weird tale of how he'd been hired to kill people
in the Soviet Union. And somebody from the crowd held up his hand
and said, "How did you get out of the Soviet Union?"
He said, "Well, I didn't have dollars; I used my American
Express card," left the Soviet Union, and then was telling his
tales on the West Coast.
And it's one darn story like that after another. And so
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tonight I want to talk to you in a reasonably brief period of time,
you'll be happy to know, about the Central Intelligence Agency, as
I've found it in the period of time that I've been there.
In the first place, we're in an age-old business. Perhaps --
I say perhaps -- the oldest profession in the world. Some have sug-
gested the second-oldest profession, but perhaps the oldest profes-
sion in the world.
Kung Chiu writing in China in 500 B.C., a book called "The
Art of War," which is small enough to recommend it to friends, talked
about an army without secret agents is Iike a man without eyes and
ears. And he went on to say that the supreme art of war is to subdue
the enemy without fighting. And it goes on to describe in consider-
able detail methodology of intelligence, that could have been written
within the last few years.
So, first, were in an age-old business.
Secondly, we're an agency that, let's face it, has taken a
tremendous battering. Tonight I want to give-you just a few examples
of damage to the intelligence community. I present them not to dis-
courage you from -- or, make you feel that the CIA is on the ropes,
but I'm continually asked, "Has all this publicity really hurt our
necessary intelligence capability?"
And the answer has got to be, in all fairness, "Yes, it's
hurt us somewhat.
While the extent of deterioration in relationships with
foreign intelligence organizations is -- it's hard to assess it,
U.S. officers are convinced that foreign intelligence agencies
with which we've had close relationships in the past are holding
back on certain sensitive information rather than risk its exposure
in the United States.
Another example: A senior African security service officer
told a CIA representative that allegations about CIA involvement in
coup conspiracies were convincing officials in his own government
that the CIA was behind every coup attempt in the world.
Liaison services in four Latin American countries have
cited leaks about the CIA as an excuse for offering less cooper-
ation with our government than in the past.
In the Middle East and Southeast Asia there have been
explicit reflections in recent months from four intelligence ser-
vices with which we have liaison relationships of deep concern
about whether the CIA adequately can protect the fact that these
covert relationships exist.
And so, the full-trust nature of these relationships,
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4
hopefully temporarily, has indeed been adversely affected.
And the fifth one: A ranking East European, Iron Country,
East European official who's been a secret agent since 1972 has
refused to continue his collaboration on the grounds of excessive
publicity about the Central Intelligence Agency.
An African service refused to initiate a joint operation
with CIA as a direct result of leaks and disclosures of activities.
And the seventh example: Exposures naming companies and
business leaders who have cooperated with the CIA have created an
unwillingness on the part of those individuals to assist the agency
confidentially, for fear such association will be exposed in the
press.
And then, two companies who've been providing material
for the CIA over the years, business people coming back from trips
debriefing CIA, recently advised the agency that they no longer
care to do business with the Central Intelligence Agency.
These are just a few examples of where, perhaps, our capa-
bility, which I happen to think is vital to our national security,
where our capability has been damaged.
Thirdly, we're an agency that, in spite of this, has had
some amazing successes. And you hear about, over the last 18 months,
the failures, but you don't hear about the intelligence successes.
Some of it is because I am charged, under the 1947 act, with the
protection of sources and methods of i me l I i gence, and some of it
is because i t ' s k i n d of l i k e reading about a l l the banks that
weren't robbed today. You read about the ones that were robbed,
you read about the sensationalism, you read about the stuff that's
gone wrong, but you don't read about the quiet successes; and I do
want to mention just a few to put in balance the damage versus the
ongoing mission of the agency.
I wish we could list the most spectacular successes, but
we simply can't do it, because disclosure would give away sources
and methods. But just a couple of examples.
We have closely followed the Soviet ICBM design and develop-
ment activities over the past two decades. There have been several
new ICBMs developed during the past decade, and we've been able to
detect the development of each about three years.before it became
operational. And moreover, well before they became operational,
the principal technical characteristics of these weapons were
.established and the information was provided to the pol icymakers in
our government.
Technical selection devices have enabled us not only to
monitor development of these ICBMs, but also to keep track of
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Soviet missile deployment with great accuracy and to predict when
various sites would become operational and to predict the size of
the force one or two years in advance.
We identified and followed the development of the Soviet
ABM, anti-ballistic missile system, at Moscow before it became
operational, and individual ABM radars were identified in the
early phase of their construction several years before they became
operational.
At least one foreign leader, no particular friend of the
United States, alive today because the CIA warned him of a plot
against his life.
A number of hijackings and other terrorist actions abroad
have been thwarted because we were able to give timely and accurate
intelligence to local authorities. And we've been able to bring
about the arrest of narcotics traffickers abroad and the seizure
of major narcotics shipments.
Trade [unintelligible]. Giving early warning long before
the fact of what OPEC planned to do in terms of economic boycott
and in terms of price increases that would damage the Free World
in some way.
And the pendulum of public opinion now seems to be swinging
back, fortunately, on the Central Intelligence Agency and there seems
to be a fundamental recognition in this country that we've got to
have a capability that is second to none.
You know, many people in our country really have no concept
about what our mission is. People are frightened, because of some of
the things that were clearly wrong in the past, about our agency.
Everybody that calls me up on the telephone to play tennis, have
lunch, the perfectly normal things -- CIA people do these kinds of
things -- work in Little Leagues, work in the YMCA. People call up
and they always keep saying to me, "Who's on the phone with us?"
You know, "How many people are listening in?" And I'm getting tired
of it. I've never seen such a decent group of people as I work with.
And you're an agency with a vitally important mission.
Let me just tick off a few of the past, and you ask your-
selves, as I tell you, did you know that this agency was involved
in this kind of thing? I know you know we were involved in making
Fidel Castro's beard drop off, or some kind of a peculiar aberration
that was wrong and that's been corrected, a few examples of things
that went wrong over a long, long period of time.
I don't know whether you think nuclear proliferation is
important. I'm scared to death about it. I think it's terrible.
The CIA has a tremendous, tremendously vital role in letting our
President, the Congress, the policymakers know what's happening in
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terms of nuclear proliferation in the world.
Political change: sometimes our business, sometimes not
our business, particularly, but something that our policymakers
must know about.
What branch of the U.S. Government concerns itself about
hijackings abroad? Maybe you feel we shouldn't be. I think we
should. I think we should help our fellow man try to abort this
move towards anarchy when a terrorist takes the law into his own
hands, and CIA has a vital role in trying to contain terrorism.
The same thing for the international movement of drugs.
The same thing about averting war through early knowledge, so that
the policymakers can take some statistics and take some informa-
tion and use it to confront governments with, not to further the
interest of the United States, necessarily, but to protect the
peace.
In the recent troubles in the Middle East, and they're
not over by a long shot, the intelligence on how many Syrian
troops crossed into Lebanon came from my agency, and we did a
first class job on it, and we could tell the President of the
United States, almost to the hour, of what the presence was in
another country of troops from Syria.
An overt -- an overt capability: We've got the best
cartologists in the United States Government and in the United
States. Cartologists, they make maps, for those of you who didn't
know what that means. And it's an overt capa -- if you want to get
a good map and' you've got a buck-and-a-half on you, write to CIA,
and it'll say CIA, and they're the best. And our cartologists have
been recognized by people in that business as the very tops in the
field.
Economic intelligence: The grain crops in the Soviet
Union. Our intelligence is fundamental to what the economic pres-
sures are going to be, what the demands from other countries on
this country are going to be.
Factual questions: How many Cubans are operating in
Angola today? Where are they going to go when they leave Angola?
Are they going back to Cuba, or are they going over into Mozam-
bique and to Somalia and to Guinea and some other place in Africa?
I think it's a very important question, and it's a question that
our agency is charged with answering to the best of our ability.
The change in China that took place over the last month.
Vitally important, not only to the security, eventually, of the
United States, but to the security of our NATO allies. Where is
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China going to go? Are they going to get back in bed with the
Soviet Union? And if they do, what does that mean to Japan, for
example? What does that mean to our NATO allies, if the Soviet
Union doesn't have to concern itself about the Chinese-Russia
border, it can shift its intention to NATO?
These are fundamental questions and they're questions
that affect the life of every American, if not today, tomorrow,
if the answer comes out wrong. And our agency is involved in
getting this kind of information to present to the policymakers.
So, we're an agency with a vitally important mission.
We're an agency with great human assets. We have several hundred
Ph.D.s -- many hundreds, I'd say, Ph.D.s and M.A.s, space scien-
tists, aerodynamic engineers, psychologists, political scientists,
economists, agronomists, linguists, historians. We've even got
a barbershop, got a cafeteria -- I think I need to go there --
we've got a barbershop, cafeteria, and, as I mentioned, we've just
got plain citizens that kind of go about their daily lives. They're
not sneaking around, spying on people, and they do a first class
job.
And we've got some brave people there, brave men and women.
Our operations people abroad, given the unreal climate in which
they've been asked to operate, they stay steadfast.
And Barbara and I took a recent trip to Europe and we saw
some of them, talked to the families, talked to the wives. And I
came back and I asked myself this question: What can I do to make
the American people understand and appreciate the sacrifice and the
patriotism of these people. As this vicious practice of exposing
names goes on, the lives of these decent Americans is in jeopardy.
And yet they don't complain, and they and their families have this
deep inner feeling that they're giving something vital to the Free
World. They don't get any medals, they don't take any bows, and
their motivation, just like the motivation we saw here tonight, is
service and dedication to country, dedication to country and to the
principle of freedom as the matrix that joins all these people
together.
And so what do we do about it all? In the first place, we
conduct our business recognizing that we are operating in changed
circumstances. We consult, in the last quarter century, much more
closely with the Congress of the United States, and thus with the
people. We will cooperate with Congress, but Congress has got to
recognize that it must protect the agency's intelligence secrets.
In addition, we operate within the laws of the United
States. We stay in the foreign intelligence business and we go
about the surveilling domestically and the things that got this
agency into trouble in the past. If we find a mess in our house,
we clean it up and we report it, under the President's Executive
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We've got to change our way of deal ing with the public.
We've got to be more open in helping people understand what CIA
does.
But having said these things, we've got to do some other
things, too.-
We protect the lives of our people by fighting to keep
secret those things that must be kept secret. I am not going to
reveal the name of our agents, the names of people that have helped
us i n the past, or the names of peop I e who are he I p i ng us i n the
present or in the future.
When I came to CIA, because of my concern about First
Amendment rights, I made a decision that we would not use U.S.
journalists on a paid or contractual basis -- freedom of the press,
the Constitution. I made a decision that we would not use church
people, on a similiar basis -- freedom of religion, constitutional
problem. The policy was changed and the cloud removed for now
and for the future.
And yet some people are now insisting that I give them the
names of those who helped CIA in the past. Weir, they're simply
not going to get those names.
We are, at times, in a tough and dangerous business, and
the people with whom we deal, past, present or future, must know
that we're not going to expose them to danger and that we are not
going to betray a trust, and that we will, in short, keep our word.
Let me end on a personal note. A couple of weeks ago I
was talking to the daughter of a friend of ours who had -- this
girl had just graduated from college, and she was job hunting,
and she was talking to me about the CIA.
Incidentally, our recruitment is up. Some cynics say,
"Well, of course, anybody's recruitment is up when you've got 7.5%
unemployment. Of course you're going to have more applicants."
It's more than that, though, because our people have a way of com-
paring quality, through certain kinds of testing, today with what
it was, say, 10 years ago, and the quality, as measured in these
so hopefully scientific fashion, is clearly up.
But anyway, as sensitive and bright kids do, this young
girl raised the question to me of the morality of the business
that I'm involved in. And all of you who have teenaged kids in
this place that works, and dedicated staff that spends so much of
your lives devoted to shaping the lives of young kids, you know
what I am talking about when I talk about how this younger gener-
ation compels us older people to address ourselves to the question
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of morality.
And indeed, I told her that, given the emotions of the
past year, this question of morality is a question that clearly
I had to wrestle with when I was riding my bicycle peacefully
along on a Sunday morning, having come from a church -- and they
do have Christian churches in -- a Christian church in Peking.
Barbara and I will never forget it. We were riding back, and
one of our couriers or messengers stopped us and asked us to ride
on down to the Liaison Office, and gave me this telegram saying
that the President of the United States wanted me to come back and
head the Central Intelligence Agency.
And I -- as I talked to this young kid, having told her
that I had wrestled with this question of the morality of it all,
I found that it wasn't too easy a question to handle. I have it
sorted out in my mind, but I found myself somewhat inarticulate
in expressing it to her. Because there are some grubby things
in this business, not many, not near as many as you'd think from
reading the sensationalism of the past, but there are some. And
there's something less than lovely for Americans about having to
do certain things in secret, having to deceive, having to spy.
But to me -- and I tried to explain this.to her -- this
unloveliness is all over -- in the first place, it's a small part
of our mission, the operational side, a tiny part of the great
asset that is CIA. But it's all overridden, for me, by my total
conviction that if freedom is to survive in a world where our
adversaries, dedicated to world socialism, dedicated to world
communism, where they're penetrating every country in the world,
large and small, we better have a strong intelligence capability.
And I quoted to her. Horace Mann: "Be ashamed to die until
you have won some victory for humanity.11
Now, I know that some, in the climate of the past, would
question whether working in intelligence is indeed a -- could be
considered a victory for humanity. I am convinced that it can be.
I feel dedicated to being sure we operate within the law, but I
also feel dedicated to keeping our capability second to none.
I spent a fantastic 14 months with Bar in the Peoples
Republic of China, and now I'm back. And I loved every minute of
our time there. And though I give them enormous....
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