OLIVER S. TURNER SOCIETY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80B01554R003000080001-4
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 22
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 1, 2001
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: April 16, 1979
• Content Type: SPEECH

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LIVER S. TURNER SOCIETY
Charlottesville, VA
16 April 1979
Lest any of you think I'm being too spooky, I've turned on my tape
recorder here because my staff doesn't trust me. They want to know what
I say. But, seriously, I know this is a private group. I do record
everything I say in public. Otherwise because sometimes you get misquoted
and it doesn't do you much good, but it is always reassuring to know that
you were misquoted and didn't say something stupid. Actually I find that)
particularly,informal discussions like this are very useful to me in
crystallizing thoughts, particularly in response to questions. And
sometimes I have found I was wasting my time because I would expound
something and develop an idea with a newspaper reporter and then I would
have to go tell my staff and we would put that in a speech, here is what
I said. So now I record it and make them listen to it and say, those
pearls of wisdom must now be incorporated in the party line. I don't
have to go back and work at it. So excuse me if I turn this on for that
purpose.
First of allI want to thank all of you for the honor you have done
my father in naming your society for him. And, of course, as Chuck was
so kind to say, it seemed to me it was a very wonderful memorabilia for
him in the sense that he had such an inquiring mind, such a desire to see
all sides of an issue. It meant so much to me in my upbringing that he
not only was interested in what went on in all kinds of walks of life,
all kinds of affairs for our country, but he was always open in knowing
that there were two sides to the story. And I think that has held me in
great stead.
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So what I wanted to do in this opportunity to be with you today is
mainly to respond to your questions and try to bring out both sides of
some of these issues that are before our country. But rather than sort
of give you a standard speech on intelligence--which I could pull out of
the file and you could read much better--I thought maybe you would enjoy
hearing a few anecdotes, a few reminiscences of my experience over the
past two and a quarter years in this job, and from those we could build
into what is going on and you could ask your questions.
Let me start way back at the beginning which was the 2nd of February
1977. I was sitting in a big Mussolini style office that the Italians
gave me in my Naples command and the telephone rang. It was the newly
appointed Secretary of Defense, Harold Brown, and he said, "Turner,
the President would like to see you in his office tomorrow." Well it
was 3:15 in the afternoon in Naples, it was only maybe 9:15 or 10:15 in
Washington. Maybe he thought that was a lot of time to get to Washington
but all the planes had left except the late night flight or something
out of Rome. ' I had never been called to the President's office in
Washington before in 31 years of service, so I was rather anxious to get
there.
The long and the short of it, I called in an aide and said, get
me on the next plane to Washington. Then I called my two or three close
advisors and said, "I want to confide in you, I'm being called to see the
President tomorrow and what do you think he is going to ask me and what
should I say?" So we were sitting there war gaming that and the aide
came back in and said, "Admiral, there's just a chance that we can get
you on the Concorde out of Paris tonight, but it is against the United
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States rules to fly on a foreign flag, you have to fly in U.S. planes."
I said, "Son, I just have never been called to the Oval Office before and
I'll go on the Concorde or anything. You get me there." I called my
wife and told her to pack a bag. An hour and 45 minutes after I hung up
the phone, I was in a Navy jet I had commandeered from another Admiral.
An hour and a half later I landed in Paris. They drove me across to the
military airport--I had to change airports--and I arrived at the check-in
counter for the Concorde just in time to give them my bags and walk right
onto the plane and take off. There was no delay in the waiting room at
all. Four hours and 55 minutes later I was in Washington having taken
off at pitch black dark in Paris and landed at sunset in Washington. And
if you don't think it is a sensation to sit'in that airplane and fly from
the dark to the light and see the sun coming back up but the sun is
setting as you are catching up with it, it really is startling.
The next morning I was told I had an appointment with the Secretary
of Defense at 11:00 and the President at 11:30. After I saw the Secretary
of Defense and all he said to me was, "Turner, my job was to get you
here, the President has something he wants you to do and he will tell you
about it." I sort of stumbled out of his office to drive across the
Potomac to the White House and as I did, I said, it is the Central
Intelligence Agency. Because the Secretary of Defense, if it were to be
a high military appointment, would have wanted to talk to me. I had
never met the man before. He certainly would have wanted to measure me
in some degree, but he didn't give me the time of day, very polite and
nice but he wasn't obviously interested in my character or my ideas at
that point. Well my staff in Naples, when we had war gamed it, we
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thought about a lot of things and we talked about the Central Intelligence
Agency and we dismissed that out of hand. So there I was on my own, 15
minutes to go, in a car, crossing the Potomac River saying, what do you
tell the President of the United States if he tells you what I think he
is going to tell me. Well, 15 minutes later he told me that. And of
course he built me up and told me what a great fellow I was and all these
things
I said to him, "Mr. President, you don't want to assign me to that
Central Intelligence job." I said, "You've got a lot of problems with
the United States military, it needs a lot of attention, I know you're
going to give it to it, and I think I can serve you much better, having
spent 31 years getting ready for this, if I stay in uniform." After I
made my little pitch of course I said to him, "But, sir, I have worked
all my life in the government and certainly want to do whatever I can
that will be helpful, and you are my friend and my classmate, if you tell
me that I'll do it." I was sort of like a drowning man and grasping for
a straw. And I heard him respond to me and I could keep hearing these
words central and intelligence coming and I was blurred in my thinking
and I could see the kaleidoscope of 31 years going across the screen here
and there was that career, it was finished; whereas I had come to
Washington thinking maybe it was going up. And it is really quite a
roller coaster sensation in 25 minutes to go from thinking maybe--I had a
responsible job--but I thought maybe I was going to be given an even more
responsible military job and now suddenly here I was going into an
entirely different area.
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Well, grasping for the straw I said to myself, "This is the last
moment when you can bargain with the President of the United States; once
you have accepted the job you can cajole, you can plead, you can reason,
but until you have said yes, you can bargain." And I had been around
just enough to appreciate that fundamental fact. And I remembered that
he had said to me, "Stan I don't want you to be just the Director of the
Central Intelligence Agency, you know this is a double job, you are also
the Director of Central Intelligence, and that is to coordinate all of
the intelligence activities of our country, not just run the CIA, that's
a separate job." So while I was grasping here from my leverage, from my
bargaining, I said, "Mr. President, I don't think the Director of Central
Intelligence has enough authority to coordinate effectively." And he
said, "Well, you are in charge of a committee that runs the budget for
intelligence." And I said, "Mr. President, no committee ever decided
anything and in this town you need authority over the budget, you don't
need to be chairman of a committee to do it." Well that started me down
a long, torturous path because at the President's directive for the next
six months we studied how the Intelligence Community should be reorganized.
And in a word, out of that I received the authority to put the budget for
the Intelligence Community together.
I also received the authority to direct the activity of all the
agencies that collect information. We do two things in intelligence: we
collect information and then too we try to digest it or analyze it or
study it. And I now have authority over all the collecting. I don't
have authority to discipline all of the analyzing because we want different
views to come forward. Chuck's old outfit has an intelligence bureau
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which we want to be independent of the CIA, the Defense Department has
one we want to be independent so we get different opinions coming forward.
But out of these new authorities have come problems as well as
prospects for success. It is important that we have a single budget
authority because intelligence is becoming increasingly expensive. We
not only have the traditional human spy that we've had all along and it
is still very critical to us. But we have got these satellites, we've
got these listening posts around the world in airplanes and ships and
land. And the technical wizardry of our country is so great that these
sophisticated systems can do more and more for us. But they cost more
and more, and we've got to be sure we are not overlapping. For instance,
I'm a military man and every military commander wants to have under his
thumb the things he needs to win. Right? But we cannot give each one
his own satellite. The country cannot afford that so the military has to
be disciplined to learn that I, the Director of Central Intelligence,
will support them with my satellites. And we have to learn to get a
teamwork going here and that is why I have been given this authority to
handle all of these collecting activities by spies, by satellites, by
listening posts, or whatever they may be. And despite what you read in
the press, we don't think any one of them is more important than the
other. In fact, the more you get of the satellite and listening post
types of information the more you need the spy to tell you what it is all
about. You can get a picture of something and it will tell you a lot,
but it doesn't tell you why they built that blooming thing. So we need a
balance here.
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But in the process of assuming these new authorities, there have
been problems, and there has been a lot of bad press. And it comes in
large measure because we are dealing with big bureaucracy, we are dealing
with people who have established the way they do business and don't want
to change and don't understand it. And, in particular, we are dealing
with a lot of stubborn old admirals and generals--I know them, I'm one of
them. It has been a fascinating. experience for me to really see the ,
Pentagon from the outside, from the other side, and how uncompromising,
how unreasonable, how entrenched the military can be in some of these
things. The resistance to change is very considerable. But that is not
unusual. I think some of you in your businesses found there was resistance
to change when you wanted to organize things differently, to do things in
ways they hadn't been done before.
But we have an extra problem. We have the legacy of Watergate.
The legacy of suspicion of everybody in the government that hangs over us
today. And with it, the unfortunate tendency of the press to feel that
tearing things and people down is more important than building them up.
And that if you can be an investigative reporter, and heaven knows we all
owe a large debt to Woodward and Bernstein, but the fact that every young
graduate of your university and everyone else who goes into journalism
says, that's my idol to be a Woodward or a Bernstein, is not good for the
country today. Yes we need that, we need the oversight of the press.
But we also need some balance and it is very difficult for us in this
controversial field of intelligence today while we are making these
changes, while we are trying to get people to adapt to these new ways,
because those who opposed the change turn to the press and they get a
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ready audience. The press is very receptive to taking up the cudgel. If
you can imagine the irony when I reduced the Central Intelligence Agency's
spying department by 820 people to save you and me as taxpayers some
money and make it more efficient because we were stumbling over each
other, then I get the liberal eastern press saying, gee, we're going to
have too few of those nasty old spies we've been criticizing for all
these years. You can't win on one side or the other.
But there is, as some of us were discussing at lunch, a deep resent-
ment about the Central Intelligence Agency in this country. I think it
is turning around but I think also we've got a long way to go. I think
we are trying to be more open within obvious, very great limits of what
we can say in terms of necessary secrets, but at least trying to give
assurance that we. are working within the law, within the regulations,
within the oversight that has been established over us by the Executive
Branch and by the Congress. I think the oversight is generally good.
In a few areas it is a little excessive. It will temper itself down, I
believe, over the next couple of years and we will be able to come up with
a good set of oversight procedures that I think will be acceptable to
everybody.
In the meantime, it is a difficult period for us. It is traumatic
if you have been in professional intelligence all your life, very secretive,
very much anonymity, not supervised very much by anybody let alone by the
Congress, and suddenly you are in this new environment. It is tough for
the dedicated professional to adjust. It is tough, of course, to adjust
to this criticism in the press after all these years. I went through it
in the military after Vietnam, you remember how the military were criticized.
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Well they recouped from that because they have good people and an important
mission. And so does the Central Intelligence Agency. They have super
people and they have a very important mission and they will recoup. But,
in the meantime, we are still in this period of what I really describe as
trauma with all this amount of change, with this amount of criticism,
with this new environment where we are more exposed, we are more visible
than ever before. We do need some of that visibility. I was saying at
lunch, we need the oversight to some degree and it helps me, it strengthens
my hand over the Intelligence Community because I say to my people, now
we are responsible to the Congress and we must report this and we cannot
report one thing and do another, now let's get the story straight here.
But as you all know, and I am sure recognize, with this openness has
come too much leaking of our important secrets. It is the greatest
problem we have today. There has come out of the whole Watergate syndrome
such a disregard for what the government claims is. classified, and we
have classified too much, that there is so little respect for it that it
is just terrible what we read in the papers one day after we talk about
it in a very high form. And it does our country great damage. In short,
we are trying to be open but we can control that and not disclose what
will really damage the country. But when people just go out and leak
things, it really can cost us billions of dollars, it will compromise
these expensive technical systems on the one hand, it may cost an agent
his life on the other hand, or it certainly would deny us the opportunity
to gain that kind of information in the future. We must, I think, find
ways of staunching e flow of leaks that we are confronted with.
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Overall let me not leave you with a pessimistic view of life. I am
optimistic. I believe the attitude of the Congress, of the public, is
becoming more understanding, more receptive of our problems. We are
getting more support. We are also going through what I call a generational
change, particularly at the Central Intelligence Agency. We've only been
in business 31 years so the old-timers are leaving. It is part of the
difficult period we are in because we are moving to new and younger
leadership. It is not an easy period. The people coming along are
splendid and we are going to have good leaders as they move into these
spots. But we are in this period of adjustment to the world around us,
adjustment to our own world inside because of this generational change
and, therefore, there is a lot of ferment. But the basic structure is
good, the organization is good, the President's strengthening of my
authorities has been helpful. The fine people are there, the capabilities
do exist and, I believe, in another two or three years, a lot of this
will settle out as I say just as it did with the military on their
criticism. I think this will settle out. I think the new procedures
that we have with respect to reporting to the Congress will stal%lize now,
and I report to seven committees now. I am sure that in a few years we
will get that reduced down to a reasonable number. But it just takes a
little bit of time. In the meantime, it is an exciting period, an
important period, but also a difficult one for all of the people in this
profession. Let me try to leave plenty of time for questions here.
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QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
Q: If I may I'd like to ask one general question. Do you think,
viewing our intelligence Community activities world-wide, has the
affect of all this upon our ability to collect intelligence abroad
been seriously damaged by exposing agents and by the unwillingness
of pikspective agents to do anything?
A: I don't think so at this point but I think if these leaks and un-
authorized publications should continue for a matter of years more
that it really will. That is, we see agents who are getting worried
because of exposures of other agents in the past. We haven't had any
serious exposures at this point but you don't have to have a real
exposure to scare a different agent. If you are my agent and somebody
writes that Joe Blow out here was my agent and he really wasn't,
you'll think, well gee, Joe probably was and maybe my name will
appear next. So atirresponsible fellow like Philip Agee, who writes
about all our people, if he makes a mistakes even it still hurts us.
We can't have that go on forever and I'm looking for legislation, in
particular, that will make it a criminal offense to disclose the
names of our CIA people which they are doing now just with deliberate-
ness.
M what the mechanics of these leaks are, how do
Q: 4~ -
th y occur, do you have a feel for it?
A: Well there are several. I guess there may be several categories.
One, of course, are espionage and on my watch we have had two espionage
cases that have been very serious. One in an industrial plant on the
West Coast, one right in my Central Intelligence Agency where people
have deliberately taken documents and sold them to the Soviets and
that is just very, very bad. We are tightening up but there is a
limit to what you can do without disabling your activity, you have so
many things that pass across your desk every day that are highly
classified. Secondly, there are these, I call them traitors--my
legal people shiver when I do because when I say that in public they
worry that I'm going to get sued or something--people like Philip
Agee who write these books, who now has a thing called The Covert
Action Bulletin published on slick paper in Washington, rits"~s"a
quarter. Somebody is financing this thing and who does this. The
avowed purpose of it is to drive uIS'out of business and to disclose
lists of our people in here. It's people like that with a Messianic
conviction that they are doing good in the long run and they write
books and they publish magazines and articles with a deliberate
attempt to hobble us. Thirdly, I'm sorry to have to admit that I'm
afraid there are leaks that come from high levels in the government
in order to serve purposes, to support policies. I don't condone
that in the least but I'm afraid it happens. And fourthly then,
there are leaks from within the government, generally at lower
levels, in order to subvert or support policy. Somebody in the Navy
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wants to have a big aircraft carrier will leak something he thinks
supports that before the Congress, or somebody doesn't like our
policy towards country "X" will leak something on that in order to
get people to go against that policy. But we need some teeth. You
can work in the Agriculture Department today and if you were to
disclose something about grain futures you can go to jail. If you
worked in my Agency and you disclosed something about our. intelligence
on Soviet missiles, there is virtually nothing we can do with you
really, as long as you don't tell it to the Soviets, you just tell it
to the New York Times, which does somehow manage to get it to the
Soviet Union. You have to be conducting espionage. You have to be
proven to. have deliberately tried to give it to a foreign power.
Q: Admiral, of course there are a lot of trouble spots--Iran and
Afghanistan--but the ones that are interesting me most is what is
the feeling about what is going on in Uganda? I have traveled there
and I always thought that country had great possibilities til that
SOB got hold of it and tried to ruin the place.
A: Well it did have a greater economic potential than any of the countries
around it practically. Maybe Kenya would be as good but certainly
better than Tanzania and Sudan and others.
Q: Do you think this bunch that's got *hold of it now is going to do a
good job?
A: No. I would say that we're going to be in for a period of uncertainty,
changing government. The man who is in charge of it now is 67 years
old, an academic, never been in the political arena. He is obviously
opposed by a man named Obote, who was the president Amin overthrew.
ibit Obote is very unpopular ingnda but he's got more stature in a
sense so he will be maneuverin back in. They brought with them
2,000 armed rebels, sort of a small army. What happens to that and
who controls it will determine something. We don't really know what
has happened to all of Amin's army, we think it has sort of disappeared.
But the rebels, the new people rather, only hold about a third of the
country geographically, so there is always a possibility of problems
from the other two-thirds. You know the country is split, north and
south, Christian and Musl~m, Black and Arab. I think they could have
considerable problems settling down there and they are going to need
help to get their economy going again.
Q: What would American policy towards it be--watch and wait?
A: I think so. I don't think that our problem will be when should we
respond to any requests for assistance because if the government isn't
stable enough to handle it, you are just sort of pouring it down the
drain. Even if you wanted to go into Iran and help today, if they
wanted help, it wouldn't be worthwhile. You don't think that there
is enough governmental strength there to use any kind of support.
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Q: At least it's an improvement isn't it over what they had?
A: Well there are two things that are ahead. One is we don't have Amin
and, two, we have dealt Kadahfi a blow here. He sent his troops
down there to rescue this thing and he lost and neither one of them
are our favorite dictators. So yes, one hopes out of it will come
something good but I am just saying, Bob, in the near term I'm
worries about continues instability there., b~;fr
Q:Ct a'dwl'_1& andhat is the oversight
exercise by Congress, the Legislative Branch 6-7,~ - -q
Is it your hope and expectation that there will be fairly definitive
rules to be followed, a longer list of probes, or general approach
in terms of general guidelines? It seems to me that must be a very
difficult problem that you face.
A: It really has to be general guidelines and it is difficult to do in
legislation. I wrote the charter last September myself and I took
it to my lawyer and I said, "Let's do this"; and he said, "Well
that's fine Stan, but you can't put that in the law." Because what I
was saying is things like this. It is the sense of the Congress that
we don't want the Central Intelligence Agency destabilizing democratic
governments. And the oversight process will check on whether you are
doing it or whether you are not doing it; or whether if you do it, it
really is in the interest of the country. But if you put a flat law
that says you won't destabilize a democratic government, the definition
of democratic will just bring you to a total halt. If you ever want
to destablize Amin--we didn't but if we wanted to play any role in
that, somebody would have claimed that it was a democratic government.
We do have an absolute prohibition and I want it enacted into law
that we won't do any assassinations.
(Tape turned)
. Lufthansa airplane that had hi-jackers on it. What did they do?
They opened the door of that airplane and they figured where the
terrorists were and they shot. It was premeditated murder, assassina-
tion--technically. A lawyer might say that you couldn't go and
rescue 150 Americans in a plane if the only way of rescuing them was
to go in and deliberately kill the terrorists. I still think that is
a risk we are taking with assassination. But the problem is so many
other of these things are difficult to interpret. So I think we need
a guidance that says this country doesn't believe in destabilizing
other democratic governments. Now if we are going to do anything
like that, it has got to come back and be told to the oversight
committees and somebody check on us. So that is what I am hoping
will come out but it is hard to satisfy both sides of the issue.
Q: As I understand it, you said you report now to seven committees
of Congress?
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A: This is a little complicated but there is a law that says when we
do a covert action--covert action is not collecting intelligence,
it's influencing people--we must report to seven committees of the
Congress what we're planning to do. It used to be eight and one of
them dropped out. We are hoping a couple others will drop out and
leave it mainly to the two intelligence committees.
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Q: IsN-that almost an invitation to leaks?
A: It is an invitation to leaks when it is a controversial domestic
political issue. I don't believe the Congress leaks any more than
anybody else. I set an example about why a Navy fellow might leak
because he thought it would help get a carrier. A Congress will leak
if there is a political advantage to be had on one side or the other.
So you have different reasons for leaks and what it means when you
have to notify seven committees of the Congress is that you will not
propose a covert action unless you are confident that there is going
to be consensus about it. If there is a strong minority that doesn't
approve of it, then you are worried about the leak. So you narrow
your range of sort of how risky you'll be in these things. ,
Q: Admiral, what's the United States' view of thgci-i"A"-ef the Islamic
government situation on Iran and what -ffe?
A: Well we are very worried. It is near chaos and we've got two govern-
ments. We've got the religious government and we've got the secular
government. The danger today is that those people who oppose the
religious government, or pieces of it--like wearing the veil, like
having banks but no interest chargeable, and some of these provisions
that are very difficult to reconcile with modern life--that those
people have no place to coalesce their opposition to these Islamic
decisions other than in the West. The only place they can turn is to
the militant guerilla left and find a home for dissent with Ayatollah
Khomeini. So if the government can't get its act together soon and
back Mr. Bazargan and get the religious element, you know, give him
whatever broad guidance they want to give but not cutting the Prime
Minister's authority up, we're very worried that it will be the
leftist who combine to represent the majority sentiment perhaps in
the country. Just as they combined behind the Ayatollah--why? The
majority sentiment was they didn't want the Shah. It wasn't that
they wanted the Ayatollah. The second danger, of course, is that the
county ill fragment on its periphery. The Kurds, the Azerbaijan,
the these .different tribal ethnic groups that want
to be semi-auton mous at least, if not independent of Iran, will
start fragmenting off. And that's peeling an onion that can go on a
long way because that gets into Iraq, Turkey, the Soviet Union and
Afghanistan. I mean all those tribes, of course they don't have
clear lines of national boundaries, they spill all over. So we're
not optimistic. I'm afraid that Iran and the biggest problem is that
the military has just disappeared and the government just doesn't
have an arm. They have got little militias that they have created on
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their own. Perhaps the one hope almost is that some military leader
will arise as a phoenix from the ashes here and coalesce at least a
division or something someplace and provide some backbone for the
government. But they have decimated the military to such an extent
that I don't know if it is possible.
Q: Do you feel that these executions are hurting the Ayatollah?
Q:
Admiral, with the SALT treaty coming up we hear these conflicting
statements that the problem is the loss of the monitoring stations
in Iran and presents the, as quoted in U.S. News, (inaudible)
.. we hear these conflicting opinions, what your own? I thought
I heard you quoted once but I never heard it again, that you thought
it was quite serious.
A: It is serious. It doesn't mean we can't recoup from it, particularly
over time, but those stations were important to us.
Q: What affect is it going to have on the SALT treaty?
A: Well, we looking, of course, at every alternative way to gain that
information and we think we have some pretty good ideas in mind. We
will probably pursue four of them and end up, I mean we'll start
pursuing four of them and end up working on two of them if you see
what I mean. You go down the path until you see which one will pay
off the most. It's important enough that we'll do something like
that. There are 60 some provisions of the treaty. These sites only
affect a couple of them. They are important provisions. Then you
have to ask yourself what's the risk to the country if we are not as
confident of checking those provisions you see. What happens if the
Soviets really cheat? Are we better off with no controls over the
Soviets on these two or three provisions that are affected by those
sites? Would you rather have zero control--let's say we just erase
those from the treaty--than you would to have those provi ns and
not be able to be quite as confident as you would like you can
check on them. Now those are decisions beyond my camp. I only get
to tell people how well I can verify these and I now have to provide
an estimate without those sites.
LL-
Q : y
A: Well, I don't say that and it is very complicated and very technical.
I say that I'm in the monitoring business not the verifying business,
and it may sound like I'm picking a nit, but I have to maintain a
status of impartiality as to whether it is a good treaty or bad
treaty or should be passed or shouldn't be passed. Otherwise, you
will suspect that my telling you I've got a 90 percent confidence I
can replace Iran, or a 70 percent confidence, or a 30 percent confi-
dence is biased because I'm coming to a conclusion,,you see what I
mean. So I don't ever say it is verifiable or not verifiable because
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that's not only how well I can check on it, that's what is the treaty
really demand. No treaty is so express when it says 820 missiles
that's fairly express, but then you run into a question, well, what's
a missile. That sounds silly but a lot of the provisions of the
treaty would require interpretation. So I'll tell people this is
what they have done. They've built three things like this, does that
mean that they have violated--they've build three new warehouses
around this missile site--does that violate the treaty provision that
says you can't store an excess number of missiles around your missile
silos? You see what I mean? Is three warehouses too many or is it
four? I can only tell you they built three, I can't tell whether
.they violated a provision of the treaty without getting subjectively
involved in the treaty. That has got to be done by the President and
the Senate. The President should not send the treaty to the Senate
if he doesn't feel comfortable with it. And there is one more factor
I left out and that is what is the risk to the country. For verifi-
cation you ask yourself how do you feel about Turner's prognosis that
he can tell you what's happening? And I'll tell them in percentage--
90 percent, 70 percent. They are not all 100 percent that's for
sure. None of them are 100 percent but, okay, some of them were very
high, some of them were medium. So you look and you say, how does
Turner's monitoring report strike me. Then you say, how ambigious is
the treaty here, is Turner really going to be able to check on the
thing to the detail that is needed. Thirdly you say, what's the risk
if they get away with it. And I will tell the Senate. I'll say, if
they get away with that provision, each provision I'll say, if they
get away with that this will be the impact on us in terms of whether
it will increase their military capabilities. So you look at each
provision and you say, that's how well you can check on it and this
is what happens if they cheat on it. And then that's a tough judgment
there that really will be made by the Senate.
Q: Admiral, you are talking about something that has bothered me a lot.
I've a great deal of confidence in the technological ability of this
country to determine almost anything they want to determine if they
put their minds to it. There was a quote here in U.S. News & World
Report back in March that, and I just read this, "Associates of the
President say his chief problem with intelligence from the CIA is
that he receives a mountain of facts and figures but not enough
interpretation and assessment of what they mean. Said one aide,
'It's getting more and more difficult to find people who can write a
good, clear analytical sentence.'" Well, that's maybe in our educa-
tional system and maybe it isn't, but the fact is that I suspect that
a lot of your analytical work is so complex that it is impossible to
write in one simple, clear sentence and this may reflect on the
audience that you have to feed your information into. And no matter
how good, what I'm trying to get at is, no matter how good your infor-
mation is;if the ability of the audience your feeding is limited in
their conception and absorbtion of that information, even the best
intelligence in the world can go for naught. What is your appraisal
of that flow of your information and analyses into the executive and
congressional levels?
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A: Well I'll be candid with you. Of course it is much more difficult
to get across to the congressional level than to the executive level.
I don't have any problem getting across to the President, the Secretary
of State, the Secretary of Defense, Brzezinski. Number one, they are
all bright and number two, they all do their homework. I don't
believe any of them have the kind of complaint that is registered
here. With this exception that that's a traditional complaint
against any soothsayer, I mean the delphic oracle, the original problem.
There are limitations on how you express difficult problems. There
are also limitations on our information. Yes, you have problems
getting people who can write clearly, just aslot of people do. But,
I find that we are again in a transition that "I didn't mention in my
remarks in how we analyze intelligence. It used to be largely
military intelligence we were concerned with. And in military you
are looking for facts. You want to know if the gun will go 10,000
meters or 12,000 meters because if you are the guy on the other end,
it makes a big difference to you. In political intelligence, diplomatic
intelligence, economic intelligence, it isn't so cut and dried. You
want to know the pros and cons of it. We are frankly having trouble
as we keep adjusting to these many new fields that we are in today
that we weren't even in 10, 15 years ago--terrorism, narcotics,
energy predictions, population growth, grain harvest. We are in all
of these things and we've got. to get analysts to understand it isn't
so black and white and it isn't just facts that we're looking for,
it's the pros and cons. I get too many analyses that come tto me and
say, this is going to happen in 37 and a half days. I don t want
that kind. I want something that says there is a trend that is
pushing events in this direction. Now there are also some countermoves
that may mean it won't happen as rapidly as we think or something.
I'm sorry, it's walking around your question.
Q: No, I appreciate what you said and do I get the inference that your
problem with the Congress is somewhat more severe in this area?
A: Well I don't want to be critical of them too much but number one,
you don't get their attention as much--they've got all kinds of
things going. You go give a presentation and the room is half full
when you get there, it's three-fourths full in the middle, and it's
one-fourth full at the end. It is hard when you are giving a very
complex technical subject to give a lecture if you fellows were all
coming and going out here and nobody was here for more than a third
of the time. And they are limited in their ability to find time to
study these things on their own, limited by all the security problems.
It is difficult for them to keep abreast of some of these technical
issues. So they end up relying on one or two members who really do
study it together, there always is somebody who knows it well.
Q: Well Admiral, this is by far the most serious of my concerns if you
want to cover as wide a spectrum as possible. For a long period of
time some people, at least, have been greatly worried about the
presence of a hostile government on the island of Cuba. How much of
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a 4"_ do you see-+-*h security the United States in the
control of the Panama Canal by potentially hostile, both idealogically
and militarily, being?
A: I think it is modest. We certainly wouldn't want it. As a naval
officer, we're not very dependent on the Panama Canal anymore; you can
take most of the Navy ships through the Panama Canal. But today, the
way our Navy isD~tructured, if you can't take an aircraft carrier you
almost mighttoir""take the rest. That's an overstatement, but for a
major war what you would want to do would be to shift carriers around
and they've got to go around the other way. In peace time, if they
really not only owned the Canal with some hostile force, but wouldn't
let us use it for peace time traffic, I'm sure it would be a substantial
economic cost to us. On the other hand, that's getting to be a
pretty hostile act and, of course, it cuts off their own revenue and
so on. The only time we've had that happen is at Suez, when the
Canal was physically closed. But places like the Mallacca Straits
and Gibraltar and other choke points of commerce, nobody, at this
stage,~`tried to close off around the world. It doesn't mean it could
not happen. One certainly doesn't want to see a hostile government
in Panama and yet, the actual physical consequences of it, it seems
to me are not likely to be as dangerous today as they would have 50
years ago let's say, when we really depended on that.
Q: Many people, felt we should not sign a treaty for the Panama Canal
e
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,JJ]9L7)!&244 Al with Cu a and so forth, that when you don't do that you have got a ~?~A
- *et4vii situation there which is an open invitation to Castro and
Russia to move it. This has nothing to do with whether the Canal has
lost its usefulness to us. See what I mean? If you just say,
alright, we're not going to do anything about this and we'll just let
it go and let the pressure build up and the situation get worse, it
just seems to me that Castro and Russia would be delighted to step in
and fish in troubled waters.
A: Well, as you all know, our relations with Latin and Central America
hajust never been very good. We've never paid much attention to
it. Every Administration has had a new Kennedy plan for Latin
America or somebody's plan and this Administration has tried two. I
would say, in my personal opinion and this is out of my intelligence
business, but the one area, with the exception of this Panama Canal
Treaty, where in the last couple of years we've not made any substantial
progress is in the hemisphere. So this is really the one thing that
has tried to move us forward in this hemisphere, to get this festering
sore out of the way. I hope it will be the kernel that will sprout
up with better relations with other countries.
Q: Stan, from watching all this from the outside, it seems to me that all
that you've said and all that is taking place in the world is generating
a tremendous need for a declaration on our part in the matter of
policy. And that the policy waiting to be declared is that we are,
as a nation, taking on a responsibility reorganizing the world in
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keeping with a common sense objective, namely that commercially and
economically the world is one. And that we, in turn, are committed,
and I think we are committed without informing the public
to this effect. We are comma ted to doing everything in our power to
organize the future in harmony with this fundamental fact and that a
lot of the difficulties that you are faced with would gradually
disappear because, that is if such a declaration were made, then
there is a base to judge and arrive at conclusions as to what is in
harmony with the interests and objectives of the United States in the
world and what is out of gear and out of phase with those objectives.
Do you see any chance or any tendency A for the appearance of
something akin to a declaration on the part of the Executive Branch
of the government to the effect that we are not just a bread basket
of the rest of the world but we are philosophically inclined to
organize the world in harmony with our own principles and ideas and
so forth and so on?
A: I think there is some move in the general direction. I certainly
agree with what you are saying. I think the President's stand on
human rights for instance. That is part of our heritage, that is the
kind of thing we stand for. It is very difficult to apply uniformly
around the world, but this is our ideology instead of the communist
ideology and it needs to be put forward.
Q: It's head-on in collision with, we'll say, the Soviet world which is
rapidly geared to the control of the future in keeping with their own
premises.
A: I think, in addition, that we're working more today to cooperate with
our friends and allies to solve problems around the world instead of
having the United States tackle them all themselves.
Q: Yes, that's right, if the purpose of this cooperation is openly
declared. We're left pretty much in having to deduce what the
policy really is from events and from statements that are myriad from
time to time, but no specific statement as to the fact that we will
use every power we've got and every institution in the country shall
be geared to a contribution to whatever this policy turns out to
be.
A: Well that probably would help if we could enunciate that better.
Q: And that seems to me _j, a, NP, responsibility on the citizenry&
cue d come up with that.
A: Yes.
Q: I'm a little troubled by the thought that we ought to have a general
guideline saying that we will not interfere with the internal affairs
of other countries. That restricts us to a certain degree. I think,
for example, of Allende in Chile, who was certainly anti-American;
and I'm thinking now also of Nicarauga, where you'd have a hard time
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deciding which was the democratic government in Nicarauga. It seems
to me that it's a little hazardous to say that we will never interfere
in the internal affairs of other countries, because we might not
interfere and have our worst enemies come to power by that very fact.
We can't always win, for example in Iran. If you were going to
take Nicarauga today, would you say that Samoza was the epitomy of
democratic government in Nicarauga or would you work for the other
side?
A: That's part of the problem. Now nobody has suggested that we have a
rule that says we can't interfere in other people's internal affairs.
They were suggesting we should say we won't overthrow a democratically
constituted government. I think it would be the height of hypocrisy
to say we don't interefere in other people's internal affairs because
doing nothing is interfering in the internal affairs of many people
today because of our preeminence in the world and because of our
whole influence on the world. But there is the tremendous problem,
who's democratic and who's not. I certainly wouldn't say Semoza
qualified under that. I doubt many people would contend that, but
between Samoza and Great Britian there are some gray areas where
you'd have a genuine debate between political scientists and that is
what we want to avoid in getting hung up in some nonsense like that.
I happen to think that Allende was a communist. He wasn't democrat-
ically elected. He had a minority of the vote when he was in there,
and I happen to think they were right to helpL v- . The
Central Intelligence Agency and ITT was probably on the right track.
Q: There has been a great many questions bantered around here but
recently there haS~been several books telling about the intelligence
operations in World War II which to me, personally, er an eye
opener. I thought they were very helpful and I was in favor of
everything that went on there, but it makes you realize how complicated.
a problem it is. Now, of course, Are they
helpful to you? I would think they would be good publicity but I
don't know.
A: Those are helpful--The Man Called Intrepid. There are a number of
those that have taken only authorized released information that was
old enough and was published. The time had elapsed so particularly
the British released their files and some of these--Bodyguard of Wise
is the real classical work. They do, I think they are just fascinating.
Those, I think, are helpful. There are two things that are unhelpful.
One is the book like this man Stockwell wrote and Snepp and a man
named Epstein has written one in which he does disclose details about
some of our agents that are very... Let me suggest to you that what
happens with our people who write books and people who write magazine
articles and newspaper articles is they don't realize how easily they
are used. The Epstein book is all about an internal battle between
some people inside CIA and some with the FBI on whether certain
agents were double-agents or true agents; were they working for us
or were they really working for us and the Soviets at the same
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time. You'll nev a resolve those things. You'll ever get a fellow
to finally sit up and confess, or if he confesses you can't believe
his confession and so on. But, those old-timers are refighting their
own battle using this fellow and his book. And in the process, in
order to win their so-called fight with their old enemies within the
CIA or the FBI, they are disclosing things about fellows in the
Soviet Union who are still alive, we hope, and that is just criminal.
But that is what hurts, it is these more current ... I think part of
it is pride though.
Q: We lost our bases in Turkey. Now that we've lost Iran I'm just won-
dering if some of that slack can't be taken up with the space we
retrieved in Turkey?
A: Some but, unfortunately, not to the extent that we had in Iran. It
is a very complex geographical, geometrical problem.
Q: Well, is it true though that satellites are not the entire answer--
you've got to have people working on the ground to know what is going
on?
A: Oh, yes. Now take something like verifying SALT. That is highly
dependent on the satellite and technical things. It is just the
Soviet society is pretty good at keeping its secrets compared with
us. They don't have an Aviation Week magazine that prints the
details of all their missiles. Yes, we try to get spies to tell us
about their missiles. But I'll be candid with you, it is tough going
and yet from satellites you can see the missiles and measure the
missiles and so on. So, what you look for spies to tell you most is
why people are doing things. But yes, you need to use all devices
you can and not just the satellite n the SALT treaty, but more
reliante,on the technical there anywhere else perhaps.
Q: You said, Admiral Turner, that you can see some light down toward
the end of the tunnel insofar as the public image of the CIA is
concerned considering the unfavorable publicity and so forth. It
seems to me that maybe we should work towards a depoliticization of
the Agency on the basis that it is anagency that has to stand from
one administration to another and, therefore, it should be not
exactly Civil Service but shouldn't be dependent so much on the
vagaries of political philosophies and so forth. Do you see a
possibility of that happening or do you think it is a good idea for
it to happen?
A: Gee, I hope that is what we are doing. That is, I hope we are not
politicized.
End of Tape
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