REMARKS AT PHOENIX ROTARY CLUB
Document Type:
Collection:
Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST):
CIA-RDP99-00777R000301900002-0
Release Decision:
RIFPUB
Original Classification:
K
Document Page Count:
7
Document Creation Date:
December 22, 2016
Document Release Date:
May 29, 2012
Sequence Number:
2
Case Number:
Publication Date:
January 15, 1988
Content Type:
REPORT
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Remarks at Phoenix Rotary Club
William H. Webster
Director of Central Intelligence
Phoenix, Arizona
January 15, 1988
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I wanted to talk to you a little bit today about what goes on in the
Intelligence Community, what we are trying to do, and how we are trying to do it
consistent with the demands of a free society which puts us in a rather special cat-
egory. And it is one that we don't often have an opportunity to explain in detail. In
fact there are many things I would like to tell you today that obviously I cannot.
Someone gave me a button not long agog I should have brought it along. It says:
"My job is so secret that even I don't know what I'm doing." That is part of the
problem, of course. In a society such as ours, secrecy raises elements of
suspicion and distrust. The Orwellian theory of what's going on there, the
possibility that we may be covering something that we shouldn't be doing under
the guise of secrecy-and we in the United States have had a track record where
various agencies have indeed overclassified and fallen back under the cloak of
secrecy. And yet I want to make, if I can, the. obvious case for secrecy and tell you
how we are operating within that framework.
The year that just ended has been a very busy and demanding year, quite
aside from all the Iran-Contra hearings and all the questions that were raised at
that time. Other things of importance have been going on in the world that affect
us all. It is very important that somebody understands and can advise and predict
for the policymakers of this country so that they can in turn make wise decisions
about our involvement, our participation, and our policy positions.
When we think about, and have thought about, Latin America with the
problems in El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti; and moving around in other di-
rections, in Moscow-our embassy problem and our relationships with the new
Gorbachev perestroika and glasnost; the problems in Africa with Angola, Chad,
Mozambique-major problems that started this year; and they have been dynami-
cally followed by problems in the Persian Gulf, the war in Afghanistan, the
problems of nuclear development in India and Pakistan, the crisis in the Philippines,
the elections in Korea, the visit of the new Japanese prime minister, the death of
Taiwan's president, and our relationship with the People's Republic of China. This
is just to mention a few issues and to get your thinking clear on the importance of
our understanding, as best we can, and with every resource that is available to us,
what is happening in the world in order that those to whom we have entrusted our
leadership can make wise and sound decisions.
I am not a policymaker and CIA is not engaged in policymaking. That is an
important point for me to remember and for all of you to remember. But if I were a
policymaker, I would not want research papers, but I would want national
estimates prepared for use that are helpful, not simply giving the kind of
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regurgitation of information that is available in the common libraries. We have
within the Intelligence Community and particularly within the Central Intelligence
Agency vast human and technical collection capability-both human resources
around the world and satellites in the sky. And we have within the Agency an
enormous pool of dedicated, talented, and gifted Americans-the functional
equivalent of a great American university. The problem, the test, is to make the
maximum and most effective use of those resources consistent with the kind of
society that we have.
I'm not going, because of the time.allowed, to tell you all of the things that
we do to assure ourselves that the information is useful. The terms of reference
that we prove, the terms of studies have a lot to do with this, but so I think do the
weekly meetings that I have separately with the adviser to the President on
national security, lunch with the Secretary of State, breakfast with the Secretary of
Defense, and many others to be sure that we are in tune with their needs-all go
into the process of being useful.
We have to understand, in a very large sense, what is going on in terms of
arms production and arms usage. In my litany I gave you a little earlier I should
have included arms control because it is one of the most important things we are
working on at the present time. We need to know both the capabilities and the in-
tentions of our adversaries. That information cannot wait too long. I visited
NORAD, some of you may have been there yourselves, the Cheyenne Mountains,
in Colorado, one of the most important centers of our early warning systems
where it became abundantly clear that we don't deal any more in terms of years,
or weeks, or days, but often in terms of minutes in which to make a decision about
whether something that has been launched represents a direct threat to the
security of this country calling for a cataclysmic response.
In addition to being useful and timely, it is very important that our.work
product not only be objective but be seen to be objective. All last year we heard
reports, accusations, and innuendos that somebody was "cooking the books" to
favor a particular line of policy that those in the Intelligence Community wanted to
see happen. I don't think this is factually accurate, but I have put in place a number
of procedures. I will not detail these procedures now, but they are designed not
only to satisfy the policymakers of the objectivity of our work, but to assure and
satisfy those gifted people I mentioned earlier who produce the national estimates
that they are allowed to produce their opinions and their views within a framework
in which we are not trying to influence or shape their outcome. We want to call it
the way that it is. And I have made it very clear to the policymakers that, in turn,
they may use it any way they want. They. may use it in its entirety, they may use it
in part, they may ignore it, they may tear it up and throw it away, but they may not
change it. It stands as the record of our Intelligence Community assessment and it
will be there for history to judge.
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We had that problem in a small way in the Persian Gulf, when the
policymakers got ahead of the Intelligence Community in making certain decisions,
including the flagging of tankers without knowing what all of the implications of
their actions were, according to our own best estimates. And there was some
grousing that perhaps they ought to be allowed to have something to say about
how that assessment worked. It might actually implicate the War Powers Act or
some other thing. We made it very clear that our estimates would be the best we
could produce. They would not for any political reason, or policy reason, be
changed. And I think it's a healthy relationship now between what we do and what
they do. And I think that that relationship may very well be, in the final analysis,
the most important contribution that I could make in galvanizing a cohesive
Intelligence Community without compromising the integrity of the individual
analysts or the program managers.
All of you I'm sure appreciate the need for secrecy in much of what we do.
The two key words that have come to be very important to me, and more so than
in any past experience I've had-we certainly were aware of them at the FBI-are
sources and methods. If we do not have sources around the world willing to tell us
information that we need, because they fear that their identity will be revealed by
one process or another-whether it is public congressional inquiries or leaking to
the press or by any other means-we're not going to have those sources, and
we're not going to have that information. If we cannot develop our most
sophisticated technology for gathering information-whether it's signals intelli-
gence, communications intelligence, imagery intelligence of photographs we take
from the sky-we're not going to have the methods because our adversaries will
devise and have devised the means to frustrate the methods that have become so
successful for us.
And so, while we need to protect sources and methods, we have to find a
way consistent with that need for secrecy to demonstrate that we are account-
able, and to find methods of being accountable that build, rather than erode, trust
with those who have the oversight responsibility for our work, particularly the
Congress.
I want to talk to you about covert action, a term that became almost a
household term during the past year. It is an activity that has been assigned to us
and accounts for less than three percent of our resources but which attracts the
most heat, the most confusion, and generates the most ill ease and suspicion. Co-
vert action is what it says-it is action that is not intended to be made public. But
what it is, primarily, is political work through communications, through training of
People in other countries, providing supplies, giving advice. The purpose of covert
action is to implement foreign policy-our foreign policy, our national policy, not
the foreign policy of the CIA or any other internal group, but the declared policy of
this country. And we do it because there are many countries in the world whose
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leaders need and want our help, but for political reasons and other legitimate
appropriate reasons cannot have our participation known at the risk of destabiliz-
ing their countries. There are also emerging democratic forces around the world
that need our support, and our State Department and our President have taken po-
sitions to support those democratically oriented organizations-insurgencies
which are fighting for the opportunity for freedom in their country. And obviously,
our participation in support of those agencies must be done clandestinely.
The statutes and the regulations define covert action as activities conduct-
ed in such a way that the role of the United States Government is not apparent.
From President Franklin Delano Roosevelt forward, in my lifetime every single
President has endorsed and used covert action. How we use it, of course,
becomes vitally important.
I hope that you will not associate the problems of Iran-Contra with covert
action generally. The problem there was that a non-intelligence agency, the
National Security Council, slowly and through understandable error became an
operational center for the release of hostages and the development of initiatives
looking for people in Iran after Khomeini. Orders were issued out of the National
Security Council that, in my view, should not have come from there because they
were operational. The National Security Council is designed to coalesce and
coordinate policy options for the President to decide, not to engage in operational
activities. They did not understand and were not subject to the constraints that
would have worked within the Central Intelligence Agency. That whole situation
was described as a government without rules inside a government that did not
know, and it must not happen again. Fortunately, the President and the national
security adviser at the time made it very clear that the National Security Council
was out of the operations business, and it now falls back to those of us who are
disciplined to understand the constraints under which we must operate.
I came to this job bringing with me two cardinal theses that I developed in
my own mind both on the bench and with the FBI. And they are that intelligence
activities must be conducted lawfully and with absolute fidelity to our Constitution
and to our laws; and that there must be a trustworthy system of oversight which
builds, rather than erodes, trust and confidence. Today, most proposals for covert
activities are advanced because the State Department or the Department of
Defense or some other policymaking organization has come to us for help. When a
proposal emerges, it must pass through a strict screening process in the Central
Intelligence Agency, ultimately going to a group of senior managers known as the
CARG, the Covert Action Review Group, which examines the proposal not only in
terms of its management problems, but also asks itself these questions: is it
consistent with overt United States foreign policy? Remember, this was one of the
problems in Iran-Contra. Is it consistent with American values? Will it make sense
to the American people when it becomes public? And will it work? I think this kind
of scrutiny assures a more effective and productive use of our covert activity.
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And then I present the same kinds of questions in our presentation to the
National Security Council for the National Security Council Planning Group, with the
heads of our major departments-Defense, State, Treasury, Justice-the
President, and the Vice President, in attendance, so that they too have to ask
themselves these questions. And then, the President himself makes a formal
finding that the covert action is necessary for our national security.
Not only do we have internally the means of presenting a logical approach
to covert action, but we must follow a line of rules established by the President
and his National Security Decision Directive-NSDD-and also by a series of laws
going back to 1976 and 1977 when Congress undertook to exercise oversight re-
sponsibility of the Intelligence Community. The Intelligence Community is required
by law to keep both of the intelligence committees fully and currently informed of
all intelligence activities. When something is unusually sensitive, we can do this by
reporting to what we call the "Gang of Eight," which is the chairman and vice
chairman of both committees in the House and Senate, and the Majority Leader
and Minority Leader, and so on. They can then be the surrogates for the balance of
the Congress on these more sensitive matters.
The law requires that the intelligence committees be kept informed on a
timely basis. This year we are going through a kind of debate over whether there
are any exceptions to immediate or prompt notice. There is a bill in Congress now
to require notice within 48 hours. The President's NSDD requires notice within 48
hours of. any finding that he makes except in those extraordinarily rare circum-
stances where he may determine that for reasons of life-threatening situations he
would defer it. But he cannot defer it for more than 10 days without reexamining
his position-in my view, a very logical approach to make sure that a decision is
not made, as it was in Iran-Contra, not to tell the Congress and then put the finding
on the shelf and not examine it again for 18 months. Every 10 days, that issue
comes back to the President. I hope that in the ongoing legislation, efforts that will
in any way restrict our ability to function in confidence, in protecting the lives that
are involved, will give way to the more sane and rational approach that the
President has committed himself to through a public document.
If these rules are all in place, and they are being scrupulously followed, I
have taken the position that in dealing with the Congress, as distinguished from
the use of deception in intelligence activities abroad, there is no excuse for
deception of any kind. There will be occasions when, for reasons I have outlined
to you, I will not want our people to divulge vital and secret information that ex-
Poses unnecessary risk to the projects or the individuals involved. But in those sit-
uations, and I have done this, I have told'the Congress that I have an answer but I
do not want to give it, and I have outlined the reasons. That gives those on the in-
telligence committees an opportunity to increase their heat on me if they think I'm
wrong, to discuss it further with me, to negotiate and find a way to satisfy them
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that they are carrying out their oversight responsibilities without putting to
unnecessary risk the projects or the people involved. But never will we answer
obliquely or disingenuously or treat the question so narrowly that one can't have
an answer that does not inform the Congress and pretend that we have answered
the question. It is very, very important that through this level of candor, without
giving up our sources and methods, we can indeed build rather than erode trust.
I think there is a limit to legislation in accomplishing missions of this kind
which depend upon character. Trust in verification is the President's motto in arms
control. And something very like it is true as we approach the difficult problem of
making sure that we continue to build intelligence capability around the world, and
at the same time demonstrate that we are accountable under our laws to those
who have the responsibility for what we do.
An old friend of mine, Sir William Stephenson, 92 years old today, living in
Bermuda, was the subject of a book a few years ago called A Man Called Intrepid.
He didn't write the book but he wrote a foreword to the book, and in that
foreword he said this: "Perhaps a day will dawn when tyrants can no longer
threaten the liberty of any people. When the function of all people, however varied
their ideologies, will be to enhance life not to control it. If such a condition is possi-
ble, it is in a future too far distant to foresee. Until that safer, better day, the de-
mocracies will avoid disaster and possible total destruction only by maintaining
their defenses. Among the increasingly intricate arsenals across the world,
intelligence is an essential weapon. (This is the man who helped break the code,
the German code, and did so much during World War II.) Intelligence is an
essential weapon. Perhaps the most important. But it is, being secret, the most
dangerous. Safeguards to prevent its abuse must be devised, revised, and rigidly
applied. But as in all enterprise, the character and wisdom of those to whom it is
entrusted will be decisive. In the integrity of that guardianship lies the hope of free
people to endure and prevail."
It seems to me a nation dedicated to the rule of law can protect itself and its
heritage in no other way.
Thank you.
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