SPEECH BY LT. GENERAL VERNON A. WALTERS BEFORE U.S. NAVAL ACADEMY HISTORY CLUB

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00901R000700050001-8
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 31
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 26, 2006
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: February 25, 1976
• Content Type: SPEECH

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SPEECH
by
LT. GENERAL VERNON A. WALTERS
before
U.S. NAVAL ACADEMY HISTORY CLUB
Annapolis, Maryland
25 February 1976
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Gentlemen:
I am very happy to be here tonight. I have always
had, since those landings in North Africa, a great sense of
debt to the United States Navy. If it were not for the
United States Navy, I don't think I'd be here tonight.
During those landings I was sent ashore a little in advance
of most of the main events with the mission of kidnapping
16 crane operators in their homes and getting them down to
the dock so that at daybreak when the ships sailed in they
could be unloaded. I've kept my fingers crossed hoping that
either the Statute of Limitations will cover me or the
Senate Select Committee will not stumble on this event of
my dim and distant past.
But during that night at daybreak, or even before day-
break, we were being shelled by some French coastal batter-
ies and we had a Navy fire-control party ashore with us.
None; of us had ever seen any artillery bursts at anything
like close range before, and we were all quite horrified
at how black and how red and how unpleasant it was. And
we said tothis naval fire-control party, "Do something at
once." So they got on their little radios and were talking
out to the battleship New York, and it fired and I was amazed
that you can see these big 12-inch shells, I think they were,
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as they came across the sky, and they fell quite far behind
the French gun batteries. And the French fired at us again
and it was closer and more unpleasant. And we were very
agitated with the naval fire-control party and told them to
do something, and they said, "Yes." They were equally agitated
since they were with us. The third salvo was in the gunpits,
and those guns fired no more at us that night. Many states
kept their ships like North Carolina, Alabama, and Texas,
and if anybody in New York wanted to take a subscription,
I would have been the generous subscriber to the preserva-
tion of the immortality of the battleship New York.
I came tonight to talk to you about what I honestly
believe to be the oldest profession in the world. You're
thinking of the one popularly believed to be the oldest
profession in the world. But you see the reason why I say
intelligence is the oldest profession in the world is
somebody had to know where it was before the other could be
exercised. But basically I want to talk to you a little
bit about intelligence. What is it? Principally, it is
information on the actions, capabilities, and intentions of
foreign powers that may in some way impact on our life and
the future of our nation and may affect the way we live.
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Why do we need it? We need it because we live in the small-
est world in which Americans have ever lived. When we were
told by one of our early Presidents that eternal vigilance
was the price of liberty, he was talking about a United
States with a two-or three-month cushion on either side.
James Madison once said that he hadn't heard from his minister
in Spain for two years, and that if he didn't hear from him
within the next year he was certainly going to send someone
to see what was going on in Spain.
We live now in a time of almost instant communication
and instant requirement for decisions. In the old days events
took place and matured slowly and the policymakers had plenty,
of time to decide what they were going to do about various
things. Now, almost every day there is a cascade of: events
bursting upon them, all of them requiring some action as to
what they should do. Now the United States has a very peculiar
history in intelligence. During all our wars we always
built up a very effective intelligence system, and then we
have promptly proceeded to demolish it as soon as the war
was over. There is something in our American soul --? I'm
sorry but I think it is sort of a pharisaical streak -- that
says, "0 Lord I thank thee that I am not like those dirty
British, French, Russians and Germans who engage in spying.
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We are pure and noble and don't do this sort of thing."
And this is a great delusion we have about ourselves na-
tionally that doesn't correspond to history.
Out at the CIA we have a statue of Nathan Hale. It
was put there over my energetic protest. Not that Nathan
Hale wasn't a very brave young man who made a very immortal
statement about regretting that he only had one life to give
to his country, but he was after all an intelligence agent
who was caught on his first mission, and he had all the
evidence cleverly placed in his shoe. He went to Manhattan
to find out where the British were going to land and when.
They were already there when he got there. And this was
a very expensive mistake. In addition to that, before he
went he committed a breach of secrecy. He told one of his
friends that he was going to go do this, and the guy looked
at him and said, "But Nathan, how can you stoop so low."
So we already had at the early stage of our life this busi-
ness about spying is not American.
But George Washington didn't feel that way. George
Washington was probably the most avid user of intelligence
in American history. There is one very remarkable letter
which he wrote to his chief of intelligence in New Jersey,
Colonel Elias Dayton, in which he said roughly this: "The
need for procuring good intelligence is so obvious that I
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have nothing further to add on this score. All that re-
mains for me is to tell you that these matters must be kept
as secret as possible. For lack of such secrecy these en-
terprises generally fail no matter how promising the outlook.
I am, sir, your obedient servant - George Washington."
On another occasion, he spent the night at the home of
a revolutionary sympathizer, a Mr. Holcomb in Connecticut.
In the morning he got out, climbed up on his horse, and
Mrs. Holcomb came out and said, "Pray General, where do you
ride tonight?" And he leaned down from the saddle and said,
"Madame, can you keep a secret?" And she said, "Of course."
He said, "So can I madame," tipped his hat and rode off.
So we haven't always had this great passion about tell-
ing everybody everything. We had Mr. Stimson, our dis-
tinguished Secretary of State and later Secretary of War.
In 1932 he was handed a decoded message of a foreign coun-
try, and he piously averted his head, and held out his hand
and said, "Gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's mail."
Ten years later as Secretary of War he couldn't get his
hands on enough other gentlemen's mail. But this kind of
mentality led us to Pearl Harbor. Now we were lucky at
Pearl Harbor -- the carriers weren't there. We had time.
We recovered from the naval Pearl Harbor. Can anybody re-
cover from a nuclear Pearl Harbor? That is the question
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we must ask ourselves, as to whether we need intelligence,
and whether we need it fast or not.
It was Pearl Harbor that led to the creation of the
CIA. In the last great investigation we had, in 1946, every-
body was trying to saddle somebody else with the blame for
Pearl Harbor. But what was generally agreed was that squirreled
away in various places in the US Government there were pieces
of information which, had they been brought together at any
central point, would have enabled us, if not to prevent Pearl
Harbor, at least to minimize the damage. Hence the name of
the Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, which was created
to try and centralize all of the information flowing into the
US Government.
Now who collects intelligence in the US Government?
More people than you would suspect. The Defense Department
collects intelligence, the three services collect intelli-
gence of particular interest to them, the Treasury collects
intelligence, the Atomic Energy or the Energy Research and
Development Administration collects intelligence, the Cen-
tral Intelligence Agency collects intelligence, and the
State Department collects intelligence. In fact I would
say roughly 50 percent of the intelligence in our various
publications comes from some overt source, having nothing
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to do with secrecy. But of course the overt information
is generally the easiest one to obtain.
How do we collect this intelligence? Well, we collect
it in various ways. We collect it overtly by reading the
newspaper, by listening to broadcasts, and television pro-
grams and so forth. And you would be surprised how much
intelligence can be derived from this. For instance, in
World War II one of the chief sources of order of battle we
had on the German Army on the Eastern Front was death notices
in German newspapers. They would tell you about somebody
who was killed in such or such a unit, such or such an area,
on the Eastern Front. And this, with some delay, gave you
a fairly good idea of the location of many of-these- units
One of the things I want to emphasize about intelli-
gence is the need that it be timely. If you don't get it back
in time it isn't intelligence, it is history. And you could
learn from it, but not to the same degree as if you have
some tactical requirement upon you.
Now the second way we collect intelligence, and this
is one of the areas in which America has brought great
contributions to the whole business of intelligence, is by
the various complicated technical systems, -- by the overhead
photography, by the various electronics, by all the other
extraordinary systems which we use and to which the ingenuity
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that has taken us to the moon has been applied. This is
the really costly area of intelligence. It is extraordinarily
productive. It will tell you what is there physically.
However, there is only one way to get inside people's heads,
or under a roof, and that is with people. We face extra-
ordinary closed disciplined societies, which is one of the
reasons why the clandestine collection of intelligence is
important to us.
Now when you have collected intelligence by all of these
means, one of the most important things you have to do is
analyze it. Here again the United States has, I think,
as broad an analytical capability to bring to bear, in ex-
cess of anything that the history of intelligence shows us
in any other country in the past.
And finally, we work with friendly foreign services,
who often have great access in areas where we do not, and I
would not want you to think that some of these friendly in-
telligence services were not pretty good.
When I went to Italy in 1960, I was briefed at CIA and
I was briefed at the Defense Department. And they said,
"Well, the Italians have a pretty good intelligence service
but they don't really have a lot of money and a lot of
people, but it's all right." So I went to Italy, and the
Italian intelligence service was centralized in a way that
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would make the United States Congress shudder and fall
upon the ground, because the FBI, the CIA, the DIA, and
the NSA are all of the same service. And I arranged for my
first trip as attache to visit the Italian Third Corps'.in
Milan with the Chief of Service who wore a monocle and looked
more like the Chief of Spies than anybody you ever saw in
any James Bond movie. In fact, he had been captured by
the Germans once in a building; he jumped out of the second
floor and, according to eye witnesses, when he landed running,
the monocle was still in place.
So I took off, and the Pentagon was having one of its
periodic economy drives, so I didn't take my driver since he
got more per diem as a civilian than I did as a colonel. I
drove the car myself figuring that when I got to Milan the
Italians would take me and give me a car and a driver and so
forth. Now I spent the first night at the US Base at Leghorn,
so there weren't. any of these little cards at the hotels
all over the world to send into the local police about for-
eigners who were staying in the hotel. The next day, instead
of going straight to Milan, I remembered a great restaurant
in Florence where they had the best green lasagna that I
had ever eaten. So I thought what difference would it make,
I'd ;just get to Milan an hour or two later and my program
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doesn't start until tomorrow. So I turned and drove into
Florence, and in a foreign country I usually drove with one
eye on the rear vision mirror to see whether I saw the
same face or wheels or combination thereof, and I didn't.
And I drove into Florence and parked in front of the station.
I walked three blocks to this restaurant, and the green lasagna
was great. While I was eating a man came up to me, clicked
his heels (I was in civilian clothes), and said, "Signor
Colonello, there have been several changes in your program
in Milan, and the Chief of Service wanted to be sure you
had them before you got there."
Now since Florence is a city of 720,000 people, I
understood that what I was getting was a demonstration that
my friend with the monocle knew where I was and what I was
doing. So, I was duly impressed with this., and everything
went on and fourteen years passed.
In my present job I went to Italy and I saw the Italian
intelligence people in Rome, and I was supposed to see the
French on the following Monday. So I thought I'd drive up
and look at my World War II battlefields and I did. I went
up to Florence, rented a car, parked the car at the hotel
and went for a walk. It was about one o'clock, and I
suddenly remembered we were hungry. I said, "Gee, I
know a great restaurant here with great green lasagna."
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So we went over to the restaurant and the green lasagna was
as good as ever. There was just another zero on the bill,
but I decided outside of that everything was the same.
At the end of it, I called the waiter and said, "May I
have the bill please?" And the waiter said, "Signor (I
was in civilian clothes), Signor Generale, there is no bill."
And I said, "What do you mean, no bill?" The young man at
the next table stood up and he said, "General, I am Captain
Manichelli. In order that you may know that in 12 years the
service has not lost its skill -- once again you are the
guest of the Chief of Service." So I think we should remem-
ber that these services can be very helpful to us.
Now we face a world in which there is much talk of de-
tente, and I think most of us do think seriously about it,
or are hopeful that detente may lead into a lessening of ten-
sions to the advantage to both sides. The advantage to both
sides is fundamental. But in this respect, I recall the
story of two young Americans who went to Moscow. They were
being shown around by a young Russian, and after he had shown
them the Novodevechye Monastary, and the Hall of Congresses
and the Kremlin, he took them out to the zoo, where they
saw the various animals. In one of the cages they saw this
huge Russian bear and in the same cage was a rather worried
looking lamb, but he was in pretty good shape. They were a
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little puzzled at the idea of putting the two in the same
cage, so they said to the young Russian, "Why do you put
the two in the same cage?" And the young Russian said, "Oh,
this is to prove that peaceful coexistence is possible."
The young American said, "Well it is pretty impressive" and
his buddy said, "it is pretty convincing." The young Russian
looked around and seeing no one near said, "Of course you
understand, every morning you have to put in a new lamb."
The Russians themselves, who are very fond of proverbs, put
it very well. They have an old Russian proverb that says
"when you make friends with a bear, hold on to your axe."
Why do we need this intelligence? Well we need this
intelligence because the capabilities deployed against the
United States today are greater than any other time since
Valley Forge. Throughout American history we faced conti-
nental powers. Now for the first time, we face another global
power. Germany, at the height of its power, was essentially
a European power. The Germans could affect us with subma-
rine warfare and so forth, but really they had no capabilities
to strike crippling blows to the United States. This is no
longer true. The Soviet Union is a global power. The Soviet
Union is capable and willing, as Angola has shown, to project
its power ten thousand kilometers from the Soviet Union.
We see the Soviet Union at the present time, in the midst of
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detente, deploying five new systems of third-generation
intercontinental ballistic missiles, each with greater throw
weight, each with greater accuracies than any of the systems
which they are replacing. On many of these systems we see
them deploying multiple warheads. We see the Soviet Navy,
having gone from a coast-guard-type navy to a blue-water
navy, present all over the world. We see the Soviets build-
ing aircraft carriers. We see them building more and larger
submarines, capable of launching larger ballistic missiles,
with, even greater range than before. We see them upgrading
continuously their conventional forces, the Army, and the
Air Force. We see them developing aircraft with the capa-
bilities against the United States, and most of all, those
buffers of time and other powers that used to stand between
us and any potential aggressor are no longer there. We no
longer have three months; we have half an hour. So we must
know what is going on on the other side.
And what do we spend and what do we do to get this in-
telligence? Less than one cent out of every dollar spent
by the United States Government goes for the collection of
intelligence. The relative cost of intelligence has declined
since 1969. The personnel devoted to intelligence has de-
clined by 40 percent since 1949. Intelligence has declined
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both as a percentage of the defense budget or of Federal
expenditures.
Intelligence provides us with clear up-to-date informa-
tion on what is going on in the world and provides a solid
foundation for the foreign policy of the United States.
Knowledge is power, and if we know our government can form
its foreign policy on the basis of strength.
Good intelligence provides us a sound basis for de-
ciding what we need as a nation to ensure our own survival,
for deciding what is necessary to make deterrence work.
In the early 1960s, we had a great debate in the United
States on a missile gap -- whether there was or was not a
missile gap. Such a debate is impossible today. We know
what they have, and more important, they know we know.
Good intelligence enables us to plan for contingencies, for
the contingency employment of our forces, and the very fact
that the United States has a good intelligence capability
inhibits any nation that might think of moving against us.
People tend to think of intelligence as purely a force for
waging of war, but it is also a force for waging of peace.
No President of the United States could sign any arms limita-
tion agreement unless he had the means of verifying whether
it is being complied with.
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Another factor, for which you get no credit, is that
sometimes we have been able to use intelligence to reassure
two friends who were about to jump at one another's throat.
I myself have been sent on such a mission to show country A
that country B was not going to jump them, and to show coun-
try B that country A was not going to jump them. If we did
not have good intelligence, the cost of the United States de-
fense establishment would soar out of sight. Unless we knew
what it was we were preparing against, what would be the
limitation or the constraint upon our requirements to meet
it? You would have an arms race that could lead to a. tin-
derbox. It is the clear precise knowledge of the Soviet
strategic forces that enables us to know what we must have
if we want to make deterrence work.
And now I want to touch on this question of covert ac-
tion of which you have heard a great deal. This is the use
by the United States of its clandestine services either to
support our friends abroad, to thwart our enemies, or to
move events in the country in a sense favorable to our in-
terests. Now a lot of people will say we shouldn't be do-
ing this. Well the fact is that every nation in history
has been doing it since the dawn of history. And diplo-
macy itself is a form of trying to sway the opinion in a
foreign country in a sense favorable to your interests.
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This is the very spectacular part of intelligence that
attracts everybody's attention. Actually it involves between
five and six percent of our budget. It is a very small part
of our budget, but it forestalls serious crises before they
grow. As I say, it is a very old tradition and Americans
particularly would be well advised not to be too harsh on
covert action.
There were 17,000 French troops in North America before
France declared war on Great Britain. The Bonhomme Richard
was clandestinely given by the French Government to John
Paul Jones. When the British accused the French of helping
the Americans, the French demanded that the US Congress
publicly state that it had received no aid from the French,
and the US Congress, which badly needed that aid from the
French, promptly passed a resolution saying that they had
received no aid from the French. This type of action is
a quiet way to help your friends resist Soviet aggression
and subversion.
For today we face a new kind of war. A new kind of war
that was best described by a Chinese author 25 centuries
ago, by the name of Sun Tzu. Sun Tzu once said-that "fighting
was the crudest form of making war on your enemies." And
then he went on to describe, 2,500 years ago, how you take
your enemies apart. Let me tell you what he said: "Cover
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with ridicule all of the valid traditionsin your opponent's
country. Involve their leaders in criminal enterprises,
and at the right time turn them over to the scorn of their
fellow countrymen. Aggravate by every means at your command
all existing differences within your opponent's country.
Agitate the young against the old:' There are= 13 of these.
And he winds up with this maxim: "The acme of excellence
is not to win a hundred victories and a hundred battles.
The acme of excellence is to subdue the armies of your enemies
without ever having to fight them." And this is the in-
visible front on which we must also fight.
At this year when we are conducting investigations of
our intelligence establishment, the Soviet Union is publish-
ing a special stamp to honor the 50th anniversary of the KGB.
So, we have not just the old front or the old forms of war,
we have the new forms of war to worry about. Now what about
these investigations into the US Intelligence Community,
the CIA, the DIA, the FBI, and all the others?
First of all, I cannot tell you that in the last 27
years we have not had in CIA kooks, nuts, zealots, or people
who have shown very poor judgment. We have. The cases have
been blown up enormously. But the numbers are very few and
far beteen. Seventysix thousand "--since
- people have passed through the -CI_A since
it was founded. Not one of those has ever been indicted up
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to today. Now I would submit that if you take any other com-
munity of 76,000 people and subject it to the kind of
scrutiny to which we have been subjected for the last 36
months, I think our record would not look bad. Yes,
we have had these people. But you must remember the last
investigation we had was the Doolittle Investigation of the
CIA. They came up with the finding that the United States
was facing a ruthless foe bent on our destruction and that
we must match their determination with ours and their ruth-
lessness with ours.
Yes, there have been abuses, but they have been few
and far between. Let me just quote you an instance. You
have heard of the telephone taps. Well, the CIA is accused
of conducting 32 illegal telephone taps in 27 years. That is
out one and one-third taps _a year. The Director of Central-Intel
ligence is the only person in the United States Government
who is charged by law with the protection of his sources and
methods. We have always been reluctant to accept these things
and talk about them, but the fact is that when the Congress
set up the CIA in 1947, it set it up to engage in espionage.
But they wouldn't say that. What the Act said was that we
would do such other things as the National Security Council
might prescribe. And this again follows this idea that we
don't do this sort of thing.
I have cited some of the Washington things. Washington
ran three separate attempts to kidnap Benedict Arnold, and
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I think we all know what he was going to do with him when
he got him. He also attempted to kidnap a British midshipman
in New York who happened to be Prince William of Britain,
who later became King William IV, and there was some shooting
outside the Prince's house. Now Franklin, for three years,
before the Revolution when we were all loyal subjects of George
the Third, was the Assistant Postmaster of British North America.
Do you know what he was doing? He was opening that British
mail like crazy, and they caught him and fired him. So
he went off to Paris and represented the Revolution. In
Paris he had the French build him a printing press. Do
you know what he printed on his printing press? British
currency, British passports, and fabricated atrocity stories
for publication in the British press. In the meantime, I
might add, the British were working very hard at penetrating
his office and did so very successfully. As a matter of
fact, 42 hours after the French Government told Franklin
that France was entering the war against Great Britain,
that information was in the hands of the British Government
in London, which is just about the time it would take you to
ride there on a horse and cross the channel.
A couple of weeks ago I was down in Florida and I had
lunch with Anthony Eden, who is now Lord Avon. He was tell-
ing me about an ancestor of his, Robert Eden, who had a very
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tough time in Maryland because the Tories thought he was an
American sympathizer, and the Americans thought he was a
Tory sympathizer. He had a very hard time, and I said,
"Yes, but in the meantime his brother, William Eden, was
successfully penetrating the US mission in. Paris." "Oh,"
he said, "you know about that, do you?" And they did.
They were extremely successful in finding out what was going
We have this guilt complex about intelligence. Not
long ago,.the chief of a friendly foreign service made two
observations to me. He said, "I don't understand why all
of you Americans aren't Catholics." I said, "What does
that have to do with it?" "Well," he said, "remember, it
is the only religion that offers confession for everybody."
And then he paused and he said, "I suppose it's the fact
that it is private that's the real drawback."
And then he told me this story, which I think from my
own experience is a fairly accurate one. He said, "On an
island in the Pacific the cannibals captured three guys --
one was a Frenchman, one was an Englishman, and one was an
American. The chief of the cannibals said, 'Men, I have
bad news and good news for you. The bad news is that we are
going to have you for lunch tomorrow and we will have to kill
you early in the morning for the cooking to be through in
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time. Now after the bad news you need some good news, and
the good news is that I will give you anything you want,
short of setting you free, in the meantime.' So he turned
to the Frenchman, 'What do you want?' The Frenchman said,
'Well, if I'm going to be killed in. the morning, I think I'd
just as soon spend the remaining hours I have with that
beautiful cannibal girl over there.' So they said 'Okay,'
and they untied the Frenchman and he and the cannibal girl
went:. off into the woods. Then they turned to the Englishman
and they said, 'What do you want?' The Englishman said, 'I
want a pen and paper.' They said 'What do you want a pen and
paper for?' He said, 'I want to write a letter to the Sec-
retary General of the United Nations and protest against the
unfair, unjust, and unsporting attitude you have adopted toward
us.' So, they untied the Englishman, they gave him a hut,
they gave him a pen and paper and he went in there and started
to write. Then they said to the American 'What do you want?'
The American said, 'I want to be led into the middle of the
village. I want to be made to kneel down, and I want the
biggest cannibal here to kick me in. the rear end.' The
chief said to his vice-chief, 'That is a weird request,
but those Americans are a weird bunch anyway and since we
promised, we have to do it.' So they untied the American and
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 Approved For Release 2006/07/28: CIA-RDP91-00901 R000700050001-8 P
led him into the middle of the village. They made him kneel
down, the biggest cannibal took a running leap and kicked
the American in the rear end and knocked him 15 feet. Now
the American had been hiding a machine pistol under his
clothing, and at this point he took out the machine pistol,
cut down the nearby cannibals, and the rest fled. The
Frenchman, hearing the gunfire, came out of the woods.
The Englishman, hearing the gunfire, came out of his hut,
and they looked at the American standing there with the smoking
pistol, and they said, 'Do you mean to say that you had the
gun all the time?' The American said, 'Sure.' They said,
'Why didn't you use it before now?' (This is the Frenchman
telling me the story.) He said the American looked up and with
an expression of hurt sincerity said, 'But you don't under-
stand. It wasn't until he kicked me in the rear end that
I had any moral grounds for such extreme action.'"
Those who oppose us know us well. They know what im-
portance we as a people attach to fair play, to liberty, to the
rights of our citizens, and to the open nature of our society.
They can and do make full use of their advantage in not having
any symbol of moral or operational constraints upon their
actions in their attempts to alter or control our open society.
Today we live in a tough world, in a tripolar world right
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now, in which there is great tension between China and the
Soviet Union.
There is an amusing story in. that respect. They say
when Mr. Nixon was in. Moscow he was talking to Mr. Brezhnev,
and Mr. Brezhnev said to him, "You know the other day I had
a strange dream." Mr. Nixon said, "What was that?" Brezhnev
said, "I dreamt that I was in Washington and I looked down
Pennsylvania Avenue and there was a huge flag flying over
the Capito.l." Mr. Nixon said that it's the American flag, it
flies whenever the Congress is in session. Brezhnev said,
"No, it was not the American flag. It had something written
on it." Mr. Nixon said, "What did it have written on it?"
Brezhnev said, "It had written on it --'Capitalism is doomed."'
Mr.'Nixon said, "That is strange. I had almost the same
dream." Brezhnev said, "You too? What did you dream?" Mr.
Nixon said,."I dreamt I was in Red Square and I looked at
the Kremlin and on the highest tower of the Kremlin there
was a huge flag flying." Brezhnev said, "It's the Soviet
flag. It flies there day and night." Mr. Nixon said, "No
it wasn't the Soviet flag, it had something written on it."
Brezhnev said, "What did it have written on it?" Mr. Nixon
said, "T wish I could tell you, but I can't read Chinese."
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 Approved For Release 2006/07/28: CIA-RDP91-00901 R000700050001-8 x
I just want to say one more word before I try to answer
your questions. I am not an old CIA man. I came there for
the first time four years ago. And if people ask me what is
your feeling after it, I say first of all I feel a little
bit like Jonah, because all of this started about the time
I got there. But mostly I would say I could sum up my feel-
ings by saying I'm reassured. I am reassured because these
are Americans just like all other Americans who live by the
same standards of right and wrong. And if we did as an Agency
some of the things we're accused of doing, I wouldn't be
the Deputy Director. We are under a very tough and diffi-
cult situation, producing the best intelligence any govern-
ment has laid before it today. Yes, we failed to pre-
dict some things, but most of the things we are accused of
failing to predict are things we ourselves drew attention
to as our own view of what we failed in. Unfortunately,
we have been in the habit of making post-mortems of our
failures and no post-mortems of our successes.
We are prepared to live with whatever the Congress or
the President does in this respect. We can live with any
particular form of oversight, provided there is a modicum
of discretion in it. We're an unusual people. We may even
be able to run our secret intelligence service in Macy's
window. But if we do, we'll be the only people in history
who ever did.
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I sense a great change in the feeling of the American
people about all this. I think the American people under-
stand that we who work in intelligence, whether it be in
Defense or the FBI or Central Intelligence, know that the
American people will not stand for secrecy being used to
cover abuses. We know that we can only operate an intelli-
gence service that will be in line with the general desires
of the American people and what they think is acceptable at
this time. We not only hope that they build into whatever
guidelines they give us some mechanisms, but also that as
the perceptions of the American people change as to what is
acceptable, that they will let us know.
We had a bunch of young Congressmen out at CIA the
other day and the question of assassination came up. I
might add that when all this assassination talk is said
and done, nobody was assassinated -- that was the ultimate
finding. One of them said, "Yes, but if anybody could have
gotten Hitler in 1943 or 1944, he would probably have been
the first joint recipient of the Congressional Medal of
Honor and the Victoria Cross." Another young Congress-
man said, "But think if you could have gotten him in 1935
or 1.936 how many lives you would have saved." And I said
to the Congressmen, "Are you advocating assassination in
peacetime? We were at peace with Germany in 1935." "Oh
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 Approved For Release 2006/07/28: CIA-RDP91-00901 R000700050001-8 ,
yes, but that was different." Well the whole problem is that
they are all different. I personally do not belive that
assassination is an effective weapon. As a matter of fact,
the CIA, long before any of these investigations, had put out
a Directive in 1971 saying that it would not under any circum-
stances be considered. Basically, it is against the law of
God, it is against the law of man, and it doesn't work very
well. You generally produce another fanatic, who is even
more fanaticized by this. So it doesn't work.
But as we go into the last quarter of this century,
we have a number of questions that are vital to our people.
I am fond of saying that we have four great questions to
which those of us who work in intelligence owe answers to
the American people.
Five years from today, who will be in control of the
Soviet Union? What will be their feelings toward us, and
toward our allies? What is there in Soviet research and
development today that will impact upon us as a people five
or ten years from now? And the same questions for China.
History has called upon us to fight on a silent battle-
field on which we did not choose to fight, but upon which
we have been forced to fight. The responsibility upon us
is to inform the American Government. The CIA is not a
secret government. The CIA does not have CIA policies.
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The CIA does what it is told by the United States Govern-
ment. When I go down to represent the Director at a meeting
at the White House, I tell them what will happen if they
take Option 1, 2, 3, or 4. One day I got an early lesson.
Dr. Kissinger went around the table and he asked each person
around (State, Defense, Treasury) what we should do. One
said we should do it; we shouldn't do it; we should do it.
He came to me and I said we shouldn't do it, and he said
to me, "You don't have any vote." We are an information
organization. With all this nonsense about Gestapos and
everything else, we have never had power to arrest anybody.
We provide information to the United States Government.
Yes, there have been abuses, but I am perfectly convinced
that most of the people involved in these things thought
they had proper authority. I think one of the positive
things that has come out of the President's program is
that any orders we get wi11uhave fo be in wr ting, ar-d that
will make people think very carefully.
I am not really concerned about the future. That may
sound strange to you, but I can remember the early part of
the war when we were losing the Philippines, when everything
bad was happening to us, and I said to an old general who
was the head of military intelligence, "General, this is
terrible. We are losing Singapore, the Malays, Dutch East
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 Approved For Release 2006/07/28: CIA-RDP91-00901 R000700050001-8 a
Indies, the Philippines, everything. What is going to
happen?" He said, "Well, we are going to win this war.
God bless my soul if I know how, but we are going to win this
war." And really if you look at it, there are advantages on
the other side from time to time. But you have to study
history here, and if you look at the whole long course of
human history in the 6,000 years which we have recorded,
you will find that many tyrants have temporarily been able
to stem the flow of human history in the direction of greater
dignity for the individual. None of those tyrannies has
ever been able to do it permanently. I don't think any of
these medieval tyrannies that we face in modern dress will
be able to do it either.
I am very happy to have this opportunity to talk to
you who will be running our defense in the years ahead and
will be carrying the torch beyond -- and that is a precious
torch. -There is no one _ behind us to pick it up if we drop it.
And you, the young people in the Navy, are the guarantors
of the tomorrows my generation will not see. I know that
you will carry that torch as it has been carried before.
We will have tough times and difficult times. I am only
happy that I don't have to predict intelligence on the
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I was a young corporal in the Army in the summer of
1941. THe whole of Western Europe was occupied by the
Germans. The German advance in Russia was continuing at 30
miles a day, and the United States Congress voted for com-
pulsory military service in the United States by a majority
of one vote. Five months later we were at war in every
theater around the world. As a people we are sometimes slow
at these things, but we catch up and we move on.
I remember when the first Russian went into space we
were told that we would have to go through the Russian customs
to get to the moon. Twelve men have walked the silent face of
the moon, and they all have been Americans.
We give a false impression. I was in China and they
showed me a Chinese historical museum. My guide was a very
bright little Chinese girl who spoke good English. She said,
"What do you think of all of this? I said, "It gives me
pause to think h fi f te
.900 0 years of
your
history compared to the 200 years of our history." And she
smile. and said, "-yes, but that. is only half a dynasty, isn't it?"
I thought for a minute, and I said, "Yes, but in that half
a dynasty we went from an empty continent to the silent face
of the moon."
And when I see in our business--intelligence--the kind
of genius and technical ability, the kind of dedication that
has done the things that have happened in our past, I have
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no fears about our tomorrows. I see the young people
we're getting too. With all the storm and buffeting we have
had, we have four times as many people applying to work at
the CIA than at any time in its history. These are the
young people coming out of our colleges.
I face the future as a very challenging one, a very
difficult one. I feel we owe the American people some
absolute answers. Winston Churchill told my generation that
we would have as our companions on our journey blood, sweat,
tears and toil. As you young people move forward to the
center of the stage and take over the control of our life
and our nation in the years ahead, I wish for you three
companions on your journey: Faith, to light the road ahead,
for dark is the road of the man who walks without faith;
enthusiasm, which is the force that drives the young and
keeps the older still productive; and, most of all, courage,
because courage is the guarantee of all the other human
virtues.
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