THE HONORABLE WILLIAM CASEY, DIRECTOR, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE ADDRESS TO THE WASHINGTON CONFERENCE OF THE WORLD BUSINESS COUNCIL CIA HEADQUARTERS WEDNESDAY, MAY 20, 1981

• Document Type: FOIA
• Keywords: SPEECHES
• Keywords: CASEY
• Keywords: SPEECHES
• Keywords: CASEY
• Collection: FOIA Collection
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 0005288323
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 10
• Document Creation Date: June 22, 2015
• Document Release Date: January 30, 2009
• Case Number: F-2007-01107
• Publication Date: May 20, 1981

THE HONORABLE WILLIAM CASEY, DIRECTOR, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
CIA Headquarters
Wednesday, May 20, 1981
APPROVED FOR RELEASED DATE:
 I'm very pleased to welcome you here, tell you a little
about this institution, its capabilities and, in a very quick
summary way, something about how we see. the world.
I spent a few months looking over our intelligence
capabilities as they've evolved over the last thirty years from
an embryo that existed in World War It. And over the years my
predecessors in this office have changed intelligence and made it
far more than a simple spy service. They have developed a great
center of scholarship and research, with as many doctors and mas-
ters in every kind of art and science in this building here as
anywhere else in the world.
I find also that my predecessors have produced a triumph
of technology stretching from the depths of the oceans to the li-
mits of outer space. Using photography, electronics, acoustics
and other technological marvels,.we learn things totally hidden
on the other side of the world. In the SALT debate, you'll re-
member, Americans openly discussed the details of Soviet missiles,
which are held most secret in the Soviet Union, but are revealed in
remarkable detail by our intelligence system.
All this has produced a staggering array of information,
a veritable Niagara of facts that pours into this building. But
facts can confuse. The wrong picture is not worth a thousand
words. And no photo, no electronic impulse can substitute for
direct, on-the-scene knowledge of the key actors in a given coun-
try or region. And technical collection is of very little help
in the most important and difficult problem of all, political
intentions -- what's in the other fellow's mind. And that is
where clandestine human intelligence can make the difference.
So to get the information and make the judgments that
our country needs to determine what it should be doing and what
 what kind of investment it should be making in its national de-
fense, and a whole galaxy of such questions, we need both human
and technical collection.
We have a good collection service. And the bottom line
is what you do with it. A good deal of criticism has been leveled
at the analysis function. Collection, after all, is facts, and
just as houses are made of stones, so is collection made of facts.
And a pile of stones is not a house, and a collection of facts is
not likely to be useful intelligence. So it's the analysis of
this torrent of facts and the estimate of the situation which is
the payoff.
Now, much of the criticism that is made of analysis
and estimates is based on unrealistic expectation of what an in-
telligence service is able to do. No crystal ball, no powers of
prophecy, no ability to peer into the future with 20/20 sight.
We're dealing here with probable developments. Some facts, con-
clusions in most cases have to be in terms of probability and
projections which cannot be guaranteed or certified.
If we can't expect infallible prophecy from the nation's
investment in intelligence, what can we expect? We can expect
foresight. We can expect professional analysis which probes and
weighs probabilities and assesses their implications. We can ex-
pect analysis that assists the policy-makers in devising ways to
prepare for and cope with the full range of probabilites. What
the President needs is not a single best view, or a guru, or a
prophet.- The nation needs the best analysis and the full range
of views it can get.
And for that purpose, the process of analysis and arriv-
ing at estimates needs to be as open and as competitive as possible.
We need to resist the bureaucratic urge for consensus to arrive at
some middle ground of agreement, to paper over differences with
semantics. The time has come to recognize that policy-makers can
easily sort through a wide range of opinions and judgments. But
they cannot consider views and opinions they do not receive. So
the time has come to recognize that CIA and military intelligence
and every other element of the intelligence community should not
only be allowed to compete and surface differences, but be encour-
aged to do so.
I might say that in the American government, we have
what we call an intelligence community, which is made up of an
intelligence service in the Defense Department, one in the State
Department, an intelligence center in Treasury, an intelligence
center in the Energy Department, and in the FBI in certain aspects
of counterintelligence. So that part of the job is to sift to-
gether this range of opinion and make sure that it's something
that a policy-maker can use and that any disagreement is stated
accurately so that the range of opinion is available. Because in
 responding to a threat, you have to think in terms of being pre-
pared to meet not only one thing that you can predict has happened,
because you can't make that kind of prediction, but be prepared to
meet the range of things that may happen.
And also the time has come to recognize that the offi-
cial national intelligence community has no monopoly on truth or
an insight or on initiative in foreseeing what may be relevant to
policy in the future. And for that reason, we're in the process
of reconstituting a President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board, which will be made up of a group of strong and experienced
private individuals with a wide range of relevant backgrounds that
will [be] charged with advising the President upon the adequacy and
the performance of his intelligence arm and facilities, and also
to challenge and second-guess them, if they are moved to do so.
Soto get all the intelligence that we need in this very
complicated world, we've got to go beyond our formal intelligence
organizations. We've got to call on the scholarly resources of
the nation. We need the perspectives and insights that business-
men develop in their activities around the world. And we are
geared to do that in an open and direct contact with the campuses,
the think tanks and business organizations around the country and,
for that matter, around the world. And we will need to do more
of that in the future if we are to cope with the intelligence re-
quirements of an increasingly complex and dangerous world as it
continues to generate new threats.
In World War II, we were doing pretty well if we knew
where the enemy was and how he was redeploying his forces. For
the first twenty years of a peacetime intelligence service, most
of the effort had to do into understanding the production and
capabilities of weapons that might threaten us. And it's only
in the last decade that it has dawned upon us that we've been
threatened and damaged more by subversion and economic aggression
than by military force. We still devote a large slice of our ef-
fort to military estimates. We need to rely very heavily on them
in estimating the defense budget and determining force structures.
But it will have to be supplemented by an increased effort to assess
economic vulnerabilities and technological breakthroughs. We've
also got to identify social and political instabilities and how
they can be, or are being exploited and fanned up and whipped up
by propaganda, by subversion, and by terrorism.
To meet these challenges fully, we need to and will not
hesitate to call upon expertise in the private sector.
Now, so much for the kind of intelligence capabilities
we have and need to develop. Let me now give you a few of. the
specifics of the problems that we need to tackle.
Our first priority is still the Soviet Union, its military
 capability and economic strength. It's been our number one ad-
versary for 35 years. It's the only country in the world with
major weapons systems directly targetted at the United States,
which could destroy the United States in half an hour. And for
that reason alone, it must remain the number one target.
However, given this complexity I've talked about in
today's world, there are many other problems of concern -- nation-
alism, resource dependency, terrorism, overloads of debt, other
economic imbalances, economic breakthroughs, and so on.
In many respects, as we look out there and assess these
problems, we're asking ourselves the same question, the same kinds
of questions that you ask yourselves in business and investment
activity and decisions. You'll be looking for the investment and
business implications of what these facts reveal. We'll be looking
for the national security implications.
For example, what will the increasing globalization of
the automobile industry do to the industrial base on which we must
depend for our national defense? How will the attrition of our
computer and semi-conductor industry under the impact of the drive
the Japanese have mounted to capture this market: what will that
do to undermine our defense capability? And how will it impact
on our way to pay our way in the world through the manufacture of
machinery and equipment, which will be increasingly controlled and
guided by microprocesses and which is increasingly being, today,
built to compete and even to excel us in world markets. by the
Japanese, by the Germans, by the French, other countries.
If the French, the Germans and Japanese, and less deve-
loped countries too, like Korea and Brazil, convert more rapidly.
than the United States from fossil fuels to nuclear energy, how
rapidly will lower power costs in those countries be converted
into competitive advantages in manufacturing costs? And how will
the instabilities in southern Africa, on the one hand, and sea
bed mining, on the other, affect the structure of world mineral
markets and impact on our manufacturing industries?
So that's just a sort of quick sampling of the kind of
forward looking issues and questions that need to be defined and
dug into. And they're not very different, as I say, from the kind
of things you need to look ahead at in a particular business, maybe
greater in scope, because they're 'universal, and in terms of refer-
ence. In our case, it will be national security. In your case, a
balance sheet or an earnings statement.
Now, looking at the world more broadly, what do we see
as we look around the world? Well, we see a Soviet Union rapidly
building its military strength while ours has been declining. We
see the United States falling behind in economic competitiveness
as the Japanese and Germans save, invest and innovate more, and
 Koreans, Singaporeans, Taiwanese, Brazilans, Mexicans increasing
their share of the world market as our share diminishes. We
see political and economic instability -- in the Middle East,
in Africa, in Latin America -- where we get the fuel and the
minerals to keep our economy going. And we see the Soviet Union
with its Cuban, East German, Libyan, Syrian proxies demonstrating
a remarkable ability to exploit instabilities of all kinds by well
orchestrated subversion and paramilitary operations conducted with
guerrilla fighters that they have camps in which to train, equip
and, with communications and other capabilities, to direct. We
see large numbers of tanks and guns stockpiled in Syria, Libya
and Yemen on the fringe of the Arab Peninsula and transported
from Nicaragua and Cuba, Angola and Ethiopia, and used in Chad
and Lebanon and El Salvador and Guatemala.
Now, I'm not here to frighten you. I'm here to say that
the world is full of economic, political and military dangers which
need to be taken seriously and watched closely, and sometimes re-
sponded to. But I'd also. like to say that the outlook is not all
black. The Soviet Union has fallen into a hornets' nest in Af-
ghanistan. After eighteen months with a hundred thousand troops
there, Afghan freedom fighters with rifles confine Soviet troops
to a half a dozen cities, to the main roads, and make them stay
within their barracks at night.
The Soviets are rightly concerned that developments in
Poland could unravel the communist system. Also, that suppression
of what is happening there would entail heavy economic and poli-
tical costs, as well as bloodshed and prolonged resistance from
militant Polish people. And the Soviet Union is gasping under
its inherent inefficiencies. Her economy is gasping under its
inherent inefficiencies and the burden of enormously expanding
military expenditures. Also, its many billions each year sent
to Cuba and Vietnam, providing cut-rate oil to East European
satellites, and huge worldwide expenditures for propaganda and
subversion. There's got to somewhere be a bottom to that barrel.
Now here in the United States, I'd like to think that
we have reason to think that our economy is becoming revitalized
and. that it will again become competitive, and that we are in the
process of restoring our military strength. And just the very
fact that that signal is being sent out, that effort is being made,
if it's a credible effort, that will restore confidence around the
world among our allies. I believe this new tone has brought new
vigor to our friends and new caution to nations inclined to adven-
ture in far-off places. .
As Learned Hand said, "Freedom imposes a burden." We
Americans must willingly shoulder that burden today, as four fore-
fathers did in the past.
Thank you. That's the -- those are the remarks that.l
 wanted to address to you. And I'd be glad to take any questions
that you'd like to put to me.
Q: Did I hear you correctly that the Soviets could
knock out this nation in a half-hour?
DIRECTOR CASEY: Yes. They have the missiles to do it,
and it takes a half-hour to get here.
DIRECTOR CASEY: I say they have 1500 missiles that could
get here in a half-hour. And there wouldn't be much left.
Q: This morning we listened to Secretary Weinberger,
three generals and an admiral tell us of the deterioration of our
ability to respond by the armed forces and what they hope to do
about it. It's also fairly well known that the CIA has also suf-
fered deterioration here in the last few years. And they're really
our eyes. What are we doing to rebuild this ability?
DIRECTOR CASEY: Well, it's a functioning capability. As
I said, we are able to see what is happening pretty well in the world.
You can always improve it. It has been permitted to run down. It
will take time to overcome some of the deficiencies that have deve-
loped from underfunding and discouragement of the past.
I find, however, that there's a good spirit; there's a
good -- there's a good will to get the job done. There's a core
of dedicated people, and some marvelous capabilities that have been
developed over the years. They've got to be maintained; they've got
to be improved. It's much like the problem in the Defense Depart-
ment, and we're sharing in the increased budget that they're getting,
and we're applying those funds to improve the thing. But we're not
blind. If we don't do anything, we could be blind. But we're doing
it. That's a long story to tell you how, and I can't tell you all
about it.
Q: In the intelligence community, how do you deal with
gathering information in a closed society, such as they have over
there, and the open society we have.here, where we have literally
thousands of adversaries who are floating around -- Iranians and
Russians -- roaming freely about our country. How do you deal with
 DIRECTOR CASEY: Well, it's not easy. We are at a dis-
advantage. There are compensating advantages. One of them I
touched upon. We have greater economic strength. We can carry
a greater burden of defense or military capability, if we will
do it, than perhaps they can do. We have a lot of people who
know how to shoulder responsibility and make decisions. They
don't. Although it's a closed society, we find out a great many
things about it in a variety of ways. I hope we make better judg-
ments and do better analysis and come to better conclusions.
They can get an enormous amount of information. They
can come. We have a law that says that if they ask us for certain
information, we've got to consider the request and see if we can
comply with it. So we're in the process of handing out informa-
tion, as well as gathering it.
But I don't think the situation is as dark as your ques-
tion would imply that it is. We've been dealing with it for some
time. We think we know as much about their military structure as
they know.about ours, about their capabilities. They have more
freedom to run around and make trouble than we have. But that
hasn't been annoying. People have been killed and everything, but
it hasn't threatened our national survival yet.
Q: Mr. Casey?
DIRECTOR CASEY: Yes.
Q: In the ongoing confrontation with the KGB, the Soviet
KGB, are we getting cooperation cooperation, and are we cooperating
with worldwide services as the British Military Intelligence and
the Israeli Mosad?
DIRECTOR CASEY: Oh, yes. We get -- we share information.
We work with other intelligence services of allied nations. Certain-
ly. The answer to that is yes.
Q: We have weather satellites to predict the world crop
situation. How successful or how accurate are those, and how well
do you compare it with the agricultural assessment in this country?
DIRECTOR CASEY: They're pretty good. The crop predic-
tions are pretty good. Yes?
Q: Are you able to predict U. S. crops as well from those
satellites? Does the Agriculture Department....?
 Q: Do you think that the Russian build-up that we've
heard about the Iast ten years has been directed toward a slow
takeover of countries, as we've seen in Angola and Afghanistan,
or do you think that they're waiting for a one-two punch at some
point when they think the time is right?
DIRECTOR CASEY: Wei I, I'm not keen about engaging in
public prophecy. I will say in response to that question I think
they work on an opportunistic basis, and they want to be prepared
for whatever they need to do. I think they like to pick them up on
the cheap. They like to do i.t by subversion, if they can. They'd
rather have figured out some better way to control Afghanistan.
They've had a hundred thousand troops in there for eighteen months
getting chopped up.
But It's a matter -- they've got the capabilities. And
what are their objectives? And what are the stakes? And I can't
deal with that in general.
Q: Do your experts, sir, give you a feel for how they're
thinking? Are they very adventurous at this point, or are they
sort of cautious? You read in the press....
DIRECTOR CASEY: They're always cautious.
Q: They're always cautious.
DIRECTOR CASEY: They're usually cautious. They're usual-
ly cautious. They're not -- they're pretty persistent. But on the
whole I'd say they're cautious. And they will be adventurous where
there isn't much jeopardy. They'll go down into Angola or Ethiopia
and they'll turn a lot of planes loose and carry tanks across the
continent. But there's not much risk there. When they're talking
about Poland where there's a greater concentration of people and
more risk, I think they're more cautious. But those are generali-
ties.
Any analyst who told me what he thought about that, what
the Russians were going to do in five years, I wouldn't believe him
any way.
Hello.
Q: Sir, to what extent has your ability to recruit new
people for the Central Intelligence Agency improved, hopefully im-
proved since there's been a change in attitude on the part of the
government?
 DIRECTOR CASEY: We're doing much better. We're doing
quite well. Never -- never satisfied, but we're doing pretty well.
Well, thank you very much.
[Applause.]