FORMER CIA DIRECTOR STANAFIELD TURNER INTERVIEWED

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000301740004-1
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 15
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: April 23, 2010
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: June 5, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
The Fred Fiske Show STATION WAMU-FM
NPR Network
June 5, 1985 8:00 P.M.
Washington, D.C.
SUBJECT Former CIA Director Stansfield Turner Interviewed
FRED FISKE: Among the most difficult problems to
resolve is the maintenance of a vitally important intelligence
apparatus, with its need for secrecy, while continuing to respect
freedom and the right of citizens in a democratic society to know
what their government is doing. It's that delicate balance that
Admiral Stansfield Turner deals with in his book Secrecy and
Democracy: The CIA in Transition. It's published by Houghton
Mifflin Company.
Stansfield Turner is a full Admiral, an Annapolis
graduate, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, held many important
command positions in the Navy. His last, Commander-in-Chief of
NATO's Southern flank. He was appointed Director of Central
Intelligence by his Annapolis classmate Jimmy Carter, and served
in that capacity for four years.
Very nice to see you again, Admiral.
ADMIRAL STANSFIELD TURNER: Fred, always nice to be
FISKE: I read your book with great interest. It's
really excellent reading.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Thank you.
FISKE: In spite of the fact that the CIA you a
hard time in its approving it.
ADMIRAL TURNER: They didn't defang the book from its
message. They just made it difficult for me to get agreement
with them, and it took a lot of my time in writing it. And in a
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few places the reader has to put up with a euphemism which is a
very thin veil over the real word that ought to be there. Like,
for instance, the initials of a particular foreign intelligence
organization. They wouldn't let me put the initials in.
FISKE: Really?
ADMIRAL TURNER: It appears in the press...
FISKE: First initial K?
[Laughter]
ADMIRAL: No. They do let me talk about the KGB. But
this is a friendly one. And although it's well known in that
country, the particular intelligence service doesn't like to have
its name mentioned, and we kowtow to them, which is not in the
interests of the American public. It isn't against our security
to not mention the name of this foreign intelligence service.
It's ridiculous to say that is classified information.
FISKE: So they delayed you for some considerable period
ADMIRAL TURNER: Yes. I estimate that ten percent, at
least, of my working time on this book was consumed by arguing
with the CIA. And that's a very expensive matter. I was on this
book two and a half years, Fred, and ten percent of that is
costly.
FISKE: Was it nitpicking, for the most part?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Absolutely. I contend that it was,
first, arbitrary and, second, arrogant.
For instance, I could not quote myself from an
unclassified speech I gave when I was Director of Central
Intelligence. That's ridiculous. It's in the public record.
It's in the public domain. I stood up in public and said it.
And they wouldn't let me put a quote from that in my book.
FISKE: As a former Director, you were in a position to
call William Casey and say, "Hey, this is nonsense." Did you do
that?
ADMIRAL TURNER: I appealed a number of these arbitrary
decisions. And the arrogance I referred to came on the final
appeal. I said to them, "Here are a couple of issues that I
just believe are ludicrous. If you think they're classified,
let's take it to a judge. Let's go to the courts and somebody
adjudicate between us." Because my understanding of our
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constitutional process is that the Founding Fathers set up the
courts and the legislature as a check between an arbitrary
executive and the citizen.
They refused to go to court, and instead said, "We're
sorry you feel the way you do. Go ahead and do what you feel you
have to do." They almost invited me to publish the information
that they claimed was secret. Then they said, "But we'll reserve
the right to take whatever action we think." That is, they
threatened to sue me.
I'm too patriotic a person, Fred. I'm too interested in
security for our country to set a bad example for other people.
So I left the material out, and it's unfortunate. But I think
it's arrogant when the Executive Branch of our government won't
let anybody oversee what they're doing, not even the courts.
FISKE: You said on the final appeal. Does that mean on
the appeal to the Director himself?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Oh, it went all the way to the White
FISKE: Isn't that interesting?
ADMIRAL TURNER: It was decided, in my understanding,
the basic issue, down in the -- well, I don't know the President
himself was in on it, but the staff of the White House.
FISKE: So I imagine you were personally affronted,
among other things.
ADMIRAL TURNER: I'm very affronted that I've been
treated this way.
FISKE: Several weeks ago I had the pleasure of
interviewing Mrs. Rosalynn Carter.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Hmmmm. Wonderful person.
FISKE: Yes. And she indicated that she and the former
President were affronted by the fact that they have not been
treated with the courtesy that former Presidents have been
treated.
Would it be safe to say, based on what you have to say
in your book, that you've received the same sort of lack of
courtesy?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Oh, yes. And in much more than this.
I mean the whole Reagan Administration approach to any of us who
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served in the Carter Administration is we have to be traitors to
the country. I mean I was treated scandalously, in my opinion,
in the turnover between Administrations and the way -- the whole
approach to what I had to offer in terms of telling them about
where we stood and so on. It was not very gentlemanly.
FISKE: Mrs. Carter said that the President consulted
with the former Presidents and had facilities for them at the
White House. And, of course, he was not invited.
You speak in your book about having met with four former
Directors.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, I will say that in the months
between the election and the inauguration, I had two meetings
with Bill Casey and did try to give him what advice I could. So
I was not unconsulted. Since then, there's been no contact.
FISKE: Your book comes at a very propitious time, with
all the delays, what with the Walker spy case and the dispute
over aid to the Contras and the renewed debate about
congressional oversight. It seems that the timing is excellent.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, of course, I think the timing
happens to be very propitious. But these issues are going to
crop up again and again.
The problem of reconciling the necessary secrecy of
intelligence with the necessary openness of our democracy is
always going to be with us. And we'll always find one or another
issue that has to be resolved over and over again because there's
no clear rules for these borderlines between how much secrecy and
how much democracy. So I think the issues raised in the book are
issues that will not pass with time. They will be with us. And
what I'm simply trying to do is explain to the American public
how during the Carter Administration we tried to find a new
balance between secrecy and democracy.
You see, just before we went into office, there were all
those investigations of American intelligence that hurt it very
badly. Why did we have those? We had them, I believe, because
in the first 30 years after World War II there was such emphasis
on secrecy of intelligence that the intelligence people weren't
held accountable. Nobody checked on them.
Fred, even as honest a persons as yourself, if you're
not being held accountable, you do things a little less judi-
ciously. You maybe cut a corner here and there. And that's what
happened. And the mistakes that were made without accountability
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by not only the CIA, but other intelligence organizations in our
country were uncovered, as they almost always will be in a
democracy like ours. When they were uncovered there were the
investigations. The end result was that our intelligence
virtually ground to a halt. The professionals were afraid to
take any more risky actions because they might get in more
trouble.
Well, so what we proved was in 30 years with no
accountability, we had no intelligence. And our job in the
Carter Administration was to follow some initial steps in that
direction by President Ford and institute some procedures for
accountability. We established rules for what had to be cleared
with the White House, and the Congress set up two committees to
oversee intelligence. And learning to work with those and still
preserve the secrets was a delicate task.
We worked it out, I think, quite well. And by the end
of the Carter Administration, the professionals in the CIA had
become reasonably reconciled to the idea that you could share
enough with the Congress to give them an oversight role, and yet
not so much that you were likely to give away the secrets. It
worked reasonably well, and I think was a good foundation for
this job of reconciling secrecy and democracy.
FISKE: You have a very strong feeling that we are
retrogressing in that area?
ADMIRAL TURNER: No matter what one thinks as to whether
the Reagan Administration has made good or bad changes to our
intelligence activities, the appearance that we have today of the
CIA being out of control, the accusations in the media that it's
doing things like mining the harbors of Nicaragua illegally, the
accusations that it's supporting manuals for assassination of
people, the accusations that it supported a group in Lebanon that
subsequently went on and killed 80 people in an attempt to kill
one terrorist, the accusations that the product of our intelli-
gence is politicized for the purposes of the President -- whether
these are true or not -- and some of them may not be -- if the
American public and the American Congress again become
disillusioned, cynical about their CIA, it's going to hurt it
seriously, like it was hurt by those same accusations in 1975. I
don't think it could survive another round of that kind of
criticism.
FISKE: It would be unfortunate, because in this day and
age, if we're to avert nuclear war, we must have an intelligence
service that we can depend upon.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Even more than that, Fred. We used to
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always look on intelligence as sort of a first line of defense,
to prevent Pearl Harbors and nuclear wars and prevent bad things
happening to us by getting some warning. Today our intelligence
is so capable of getting information that we can take the offense
with our intelligence. We can negotiate arms control treaties
today because we know we can verify them. We can take good
positions on our economic strengths in dealing with the rest of
the world because we can find out what the rest of the world is
doing economically. We can predict the harvests in other
countries and not have to put up with famines and so on. There
are a lot of things we can do to make our country more offensive,
a stronger country by using this intelligence.
If we don't have a good CIA, we're going to lose
tremendous opportunities.
FISKE: You mentioned intelligence gathering in the
field of economics. It's one of the things that you espouse
especially. But you've met resistance to that, haven't you?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, yes. Some. But we have been
moving over the last 20 years away from the initial post-World
War II preoccupation of our intelligence with first the Soviet
Union and secondly the Soviet Union's military power. Those are
still terribly important to us. But we're now interested in 159
countries around the world because we have some involvement with
almost all of them. But our involvement with most of them is
economic and political, not military.
So we've had to expand American intelligence and make
its horizons much broader.
FISKE: Interestingly, because the CIA is the kind of
organization it is and because many of its activities are secret,
and in the past some of them have been unnecessarily secret, it's
become a whipping boy. There are some people abroad, some groups
abroad who, predictably, blame everything untoward that happens
on the CIA.
FISKE: And unfortunately, a great many people
throughout the world are willing to accept it. And even more
unfortunately, a substantial number of Americans are willing to
accept it.
How do we deal with that kind of thing?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, we tried to deal with it in the
four years I was there by restoring the image of the CIA within
our country, by making it clear, first of all, that we were
operating under these new controls, under this new oversight.
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Secondly, I tried to open up the CIA to the public more,
so they understood what we did and appreciated it and realized it
was basically a very fine organization.
Now, you cannot open it up to the extent of telling who
your spies are or how your satellites operate. But you can take
the final product, the information that you've digested from the
spies and the satellites and you can declassify a lot of that and
make it available to the public, and they get some idea of what
you're doing and how good it is.
Unfortunately, most of that has been thrown overboard in
the last four years.
FISKE: In your book, Secrecy and Democracy, you say
citizens of a country are the very best agents. That's
understandable. The Soviet Union, then, should have really
benefited considerably from the activities of this Walker group,
shouldn't they?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Yes. Now, what I was trying to point
out, in sort of a tutorial about what espionage is all about in
chapter five of my book, is that contrary to the James Bond image
of our spy novels, the CIA, the American officers really don't do
a lot of the risky type of spying work. Why? Because in a
foreign country it generally takes a foreign national who speaks
the language, knows the culture, but who has the contacts, who
can gain access to the building or the room or the person that
you want to get some information from.
So our CIA people do what we call recruit other people
to do the actualy risky spying work for us. Our people are
called case officers. The other people we recruit are called
agents. And most of the James Bond work is done by these foreign
agents.
Now, on the other side, when the Soviets spy against us,
at the bottom of that they've got to find an American to be their
agent. And an American like the Walkers, who had legitimate
access to the secrets, but who was willing, for one reason or
another, to give them away, to be a traitor to his country. It's
unfortunate that we've had this case with the Walkers, and they
could have done some considerable damage.
FISKE: It must be especially painful to you, not only
as a former Director of Intelligence, but as a naval man.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Yes. I'm very ashamed that we have so
many career Navy people involved in this. And I'm disappointed
that the Navy itself wasn't more alert to note what was going on
here.
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FISKE: Last night, when I was discussing this with my
listeners, some of them put forward the view that, somehow or
other, we Americans are becoming less patriotic, more venal, more
concerned with our own individual benefits. I argued that
there's hardly enough evidence to support that. We're a nation
of 235 million peoplel, and four or five so far have been named
in this. But a great many were willing to believe that. Do you?
ADMIRAL TURNER: I don't, really. The young people of
our society today are more inquiring. They demand more
information before they'll make up their mind on matters. I
think you and I, when we were told salute the flag and say
aye-aye, pretty much did so. I think today they say, "Why?" And
a lot of people interpret that as being unpatriotic. I'm not
sure that it is. I think it's not all bad that they want to
understand what's going on.
Let me tell you a little sea story. One day when I was
Director of the CIA my office received a phone call. And I tell
this story in my book, and I think it's significant. The phone
call was from a young man who was in what we call boot camp at
the CIA. He was getting his initial training to become an
officer. And he said, "There are five us down here who want to
meet the Director."
Well, it's pretty unusual for a recruit to say, you
know, "I want to go up and see the boss."
So the staff asked him, "What's your complaint?"
He said, "We haven't any complaint. We want to make a
career of this organization. And if we're going to do that, we
want to see what kind of people run it."
ADMIRAL TURNER: And so I had lunch with these five
young people, all by myself. And they were marvelous. When I
asked them why they were there, why had they joined the CIA --
the first one was a lady. And I said, "Jane, why are you here?"
She said, "Well, I was a lawyer downtown in Washington."
And I said, "Wait a minute. You were a lady lawyer in
Washington, D.C., and you've now come into the CIA at something
like $15,000 a year," when, you know, lady lawyers are in high
demand.
"Yes," she said. "I like being a lawyer, but I was
doing the same thing, sort of, and I was stuck in an office. And
I want to be where the action is and I want to do something for
my country."
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When I finished going around that table I was almost
crying because of the sincerity of these people to want to do
something important and contributory to their country. But they
wanted to know what kind of an organization it was. They didn't
want to just plunge in and say, "Well, I've heard the CIA is
good." They wanted to assure themselves before they got fully
committed that it was run by honorable people, that it was going
to be a good career for them. And that's not all bad. But it
can't be misinterpreted as lack of loyalty, lack of patriotism.
FISKE: You mentioned the James Bond types. A great
many people have the impression that everybody in the CIA is a
James Bond type. And when you came there as Director, and you
had not been in the intelligence community before that, you ran
into some people in the organization who thought like James Bond
types, and you had some considerable difficulty in changing the
thinking and persuading them that it was far more important to
analyze information that was gathered frequently by more
technological means than to be James Bond.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, there's a lot of confusion over
this. And again, I tried to elaborate or explain this in my book
because people need to understand that over the last 20 years, in
addition to the revolution of introducing oversight, that we've
already talked about, there was a second revolution in American
intelligence. And that is that by the mid-1970s the amount of
information being collected by technical systems, like
satellites, far exceeded that being collected by human spies.
Now, this by no means put the spies out of business. It
just changed the way they operate. Because today who would risk
the life of a spy, an agent, to get information you could obtain
at almost no risk through a satellite photograph, for instance.
So, today what you do, you use the spies to fill the
gaps in the information that you cannot get. And you cannot get
a lot of information from the technical systems. But you then
focus these human agents more towards those specific gaps. It
makes them even more valuable.
FISKE: You rely on them for interpretations, I suspect.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, partly; but mainly to go out and
-- for instance, a satellite photograph can't tell what you and I
are doing in this room. It can't see in here. So if somebody
wants to know what we're up to, they've got to find some other
technique. And it may be a good idea to get an agent to listen
in on us or sit in the corner or talk to somebody who listens to
what we said. You know, there are other -- or put a bug in here
and listen to it.
So, the problem we had in the mid-1970s was to get the
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spy people to adjust to this new environment and to refocus their
effort.
It's a proud, capable bureaucracy in the CIA that does
this kind of work. And I can assure you that most proud, capable
bureaucracies don't change easily. So there was resistance,
Fred. But it's pretty well behind.
FISKE: You think that some of that resistance, some
of that mind-set was related to the fact that several of the
previous Directors had in fact been espionage types rather than
analyst types.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Yes. The analysis people in the CIA
have always been second fiddle. And I did my best to elevate
them; not to bring down the espionage types, but to bring up the
analytic types.
It does you no good to collect all this data by spies
and by satellites and not have really expert people to interpret
it. And they're the ones who should be the driving force in an
intelligence agency because they're the ones who talk to the
Presidents and the Secretaries of State and say, "What do you
need?"
And then they say, "What have we got?"
And then they say, "What are we missing?"
And they go to the spies and the satellite people and
they say, "Here's what we most need."
In short, they've got to be the driving force in the
whole system. If they don't start it down the right track, the
collectors, the spies are going to collect information about
Country X, and the analysts are going to be studying Country Y.
And we're not going to bring them together.
Unfortunately, the espionage branch of the CIA is a bit
too independent and it's more interested in doing what it thinks
is important, which may be Country X. But what the President may
want is an analysis of Country Y.
FISKE: You came from the Navy to the CIA. The Navy is
a bureaucracy, as well.
FISKE: And I'm sure that in your various commands you
attempted to effect change.
Did you meet a different kind of resistance in the CIA
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from what you met in the Navy, due to the fact that CIA types
operate differently?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Yes. Now, there's bureaucratic
resistance in all organizations that are large, like the Navy and
the CIA. But the element of secrecy gave a different tone to it
in the CIA because there is this great sense of dedication, and
there's a good sense of dedication on the part of the CIA people.
They feel, in part, because what they do is so secret, that they
have a very special mission for our country. And they come,
then, because of the secrecy, to believe that only they can
understand what is needed in intelligence.
It is a particular art, but it isn't so arcane that you
or I, with a little effort and study, can't understand it.
FISKE: You have a quote in your book from Jim Angleton,
who for many years was in charge of counterintelligence, and
about whom you have many criticisms. But the quote is to the
effect that no outsiders will ever be able to understand what we
here in the CIA do.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Yes.
FISKE: Was that a widespread attitude?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Oh, yes. And that was a very strong
Now, I certainly want to say that there are a lot of
naval officers who don't think anybody outside the Navy can
understand the Navy. But, you know, Secretaries of Defense are,
by law, civilians, and they have to run the Navy. And Directors
of Central Intelligence, heads of the CIA, aren't always
civilians, aren't always non-intelligence professionals, but they
more frequently than not have been. And they can run
intelligence, too.
You have to apply normal management practices, leaving
some of the technical decisions, obviously, to the technicians,
to the people who know it. I would never think of telling the
espionage people whether they should make contact with an agent
by walking down the street and brushing past him and whispering
to him or by dropping a note in his mailbox, or whatever you
might do. That is a technical decision that they have to make.
But I could, and did, evaluate the risks of making contact with
that man, and was the end result going to be worth that risk?
FISKE: Admiral Turner, let's leave out the KGB and the
intelligence services of the authoritarian nations. They can
operate in a manner which is not acceptable to us. But many of
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the Western democracies have effective intelligence-gathering
agencies, and we don't hear the same kind of criticism from them.
Is it that their people, the populations, the citizens
in those countries are more sophisticated about intelligence than
we are?
ADMIRAL TURNER: No.
FISKE: Or is it that they do things differently?
ADMIRAL TURNER: No. It's that they're having the same
problems we are and they're getting the same criticisms.
FISKE: Are they?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Not as big a splash as we.
There's a big scandal in Great Britain right now about
excessive tapping telephones, infiltrating of labor
organizations for what could appear to be political rather than
intelligence purposes. Yes. A former member of their
counterintelligence organization, called MI-5, has just blown a
whistle and made a TV documentary that makes a lot of
accusations. They have not been proven yet, but it seems very
clear that they're going to have some new form of controls and
regulations over there.
The Canadians have just revamped the whole works up
there. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has been denuded of
some of its former intelligence responsibilities, and they've
been put in another organization.
The Australians have had a major reorganization.
The Germans, in 1978, formed a committee of the
Bundestag to oversee their intelligence.
The Italians have restructured intelligence to make it
more responsive and under the control of the Prime Minister.
What we have done has been more extensive, much more
publicized. But everybody else is beginning to follow in this
direction of putting some form of controls, some form of check on
their intelligence activities.
FISKE: We just haven't heart much about it in our
media.
ADMIRAL TURNER: No. It doesn't get a lot of play here.
FISKE: Talking about the media, you deal with the CIA
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and its relation with the media. And it's hard to appreciate, to
understand for a period the CIA used people in the media to help
the nation. They used academics, professors, experts in various
fields who had substantial expertise to contribute that could be
very helpful to the nation.
As a result of some of the difficulties, the criticisms
that came 15 years ago, or so, both of those groups separated
themselves from the CIA, almost as though to deal with it would
be to deal with another country.
I have never -- while I don't condone the wrongdoing,
you concede that there was substantial wrongdoing by the CIA, and
you've talked about it in your book. I don't condone that
wrongdoing. I criticize it as harshly as anybody. But I
recognize that intelligence gathering is of enormous importance
to our nation, and I don't see anything wrong with an American
cooperating in the interest of his nation's security.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, bravo. I'm all for you, Fred.
The argument that the media often make is that it will
compromise their integrity if they're doing something on the side
that is not known to the public. Maybe they will write their
stories differently if they're paid by the CIA on the side.
You're a media person and you wouldn't, yourself, enter into an
agreement that you thought would compromise your integrity and
your basic work. And some people might be compromised, some
might not. But those who would be compromised shouldn't join.
They shouldn't do that. The rest of the media who want to be
patriotic to their country -- you know, if you have information
that could help your country, it's a shame not to give it to the
people who need it in our country. You know, we might pay a spy
and risk his life to get it. And some person in our own family,
be it in the media, might have that information and not share it
with us. It's a shame.
FISKE: Has that changed any from the low point, with
regard to media people or academics? It's even more hard to
understand about the academics, because some of them have
enormous amounts of background. I've had people on this program,
for example, who are enormously experienced in the affairs of
Central America or of the Middle East, and so on, and their
expertise could be invaluable.
FISKE: But many of them are reluctant to give it to the
CIA, almost as though it were an unpatriotic act.
ADMIRAL TURNER: It's very difficult to understand.
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There are still many academics who are perfectly willing to deal
with the CIA, and I really respect them and I drew on them a
great deal. But there are those campuses, those situations in
which if an academic deals with the CIA, he's in trouble with his
peers.
I tell the story in my book of a friend who was on a New
England college campus, a liberal school, and I tried to get him
twice to come work with the CIA for a year on a sabbatical. And
he finally decided it was just too risky to his basic career to
do that.
That's unfortunate because there's nothing that hurts
his profession -- he's a better professor if he goes back from
the CIA. He's really seen how things operate a lot more clearly
than you do from a purely academic perspective. He many not be
able to share all the secrets he learns with his students, but he
can share the idea that he has seen decisions being made in our
government, and that they're not made like the textbooks say.
They're made in lots of different ways. And he can be a much
richer professor for the experience of having been in the CIA, or
even just consulted with it and helped it.
FISKE: Admiral, among the difficulties that you discuss
in your book regarding the conduct of intelligence gathering in a
democratic society is the fact that while the negatives come out,
the mistakes that are made, the bad decisions, the experiences,
for example, in Iran and Lebanon and in Guatemala, that the
successes can't be discussed.
ADMIRAL TURNER: It's a cross the poor people in
intelligence bear. Most of their failures somehow get out and
get publicized. Many of their successes just can't be told.
There's only one real story that I couldn't get into my
book, and that was a tremendous success. And I do have to admire
the CIA that even though it was a success, they thought it was
secret. I thought it was marginal and that I could write it in a
way that didn't hurt our secrecy. But they turned it down
because even though it would have improved their image around
the world, they still thought it was secret.
And that's hard, of course. And it's hard on
individuals.
Again, I tell a story in the book about a man who did a
very heroic thing for the CIA and I gave him a medal. But I gave
it to him with only four other people in the room, and you know,
because there weren't many people in the CIA knew he'd been where
he was, doing what he was doing. So you can't pat him on the
back in public. He can't take the medal home and hang it in his
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den because a lot of people don't even know he works for the CIA.
FISKE: You conceded the CIA's involvement in the
Mossadegh overthrow and in Iran and the action in Guatemala
against Arbenz. Most Americans are persuaded that the CIA was
instrumental in the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende in
Chile, and you flatly deny that in your book.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, I base that largely on the Church
Committee's thorough investigation of it in 1975-76.
There's no question, now, that the CIA, with
presidential authorization, was working, first, to try to prevent
Allende's election, and secondly to prevent his inauguration once
elected. But -- and even though they worked with some of the
groups that later caused problems down there and led to the
overthrow, I don't believe there's evidence that they
precipitated, planned or participated in the planning for the
overthrow, the military overthrow of Allende.
FISKE: Well, as Director of the CIA, you wouldn't have
to look for evidence. You should have the facts.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, I wasn't there at that time.
FISKE: Well, don't you have access to the records, or
didn't you at the time?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Yes, of course I did. I didn't spend a
lot of my time in those four years doing history, however. I did
those historical things that were important to making my present
decisions.
So I'm persuaded from what I did see on the inside,
although I didn't study every dossier, as well as the Church
Committee report, that there was not an intentional move by the
CIA to kill and overthrow, or overthrow and kill Allende.
FISKE: Well, there's lots more that I would like to
discuss with you, but I would like to involve our listeners at
this point.
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