SPEECH BY LT. GENERAL VERNON A. WALTERS BEFORE THE ROTARY CLUB OF HOUSTON CIA AND WORLD AFFAIRS
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Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST):
CIA-RDP80R01731R002000110009-3
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RIFPUB
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K
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28
Document Creation Date:
December 15, 2016
Document Release Date:
August 21, 2003
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9
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Publication Date:
March 23, 1976
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SPEECH
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by
LT. GENERAL VERNON A. WALTERS
before
THE ROTARY CLUB OF HOUSTON
CIA AND WORLD AFFAIRS
Houston, Texas
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President Gordon, Ladies and Gentlemen:
When I talk like this, sometimes I wonder if I am
really here, because about three years ago this would
have been absolutely unthinkable to go out and talk
about the secret intelligence agency of the United
States. But is is perfectly clear to us that if we are
to continue to do our job for the United States we must
have the understanding of the American people as to what
we do, and as to how we do it. And so, while we have
no public relations program, per se, we tend to be
responsive to invitations to explain to groups of
Americans what we do, why we do it, and how we do it.
George Bush would have very much liked to have
been with you today, but, unfortunately, he was not able
to come and he asked me to come here and talk in his place.
I want you to know he has done Houston proud up there,
and to be perfectly honest, I haven't seen him make a
mistake yet, in public or internally--which is a pretty
good average in a very tough and very ticklish job.
I want to talk to you not just about CIA, but about
intelligence and why the United States needs it. When
I go to work, on the wall of the building as I go in,
there is a quotation from the Bible which says, "Ye
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shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free."
Sometimes I think that perhaps there ought to be a
slight change in it to adapt it to our times, which
might read, "You must know the truth for only the truth
will keep you free."
So, I go to the question first of all: Why does
the United States need intelligence? The United States
needs intelligence because we live today in a situation
unlike any situation the United States has lived in in
the past. When George Washington told us that "eternal
vigilance is the price of liberty" he was talking about
a country that had thousands of miles of ocean on either
side, that had a great cushion in time: two, three, four,
five, six months to get ready against any threat. We have
-lived,in the past, in a world in which there were other
great powers interposed between us and any possible
aggressors. That is no longer the case.
Throughout history the United States was regarded
by most nations as being unreachable and, therefore,
unbeatable. In the past, since the Revolution, we have
faced countries that were essentially continental powers.
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Germany, at the height of her power, was a continental
European power. She could send some submarines off
here to do some damage, but basically Germany had no
capability against the United States...aga:inst the home-
land of the United States. That situation has changed.
The Soviet Union is today a global power. Angola has
just shown us that the Russians are quite willing and
able to project their power 8,000 miles from the Soviet
Union. The Soviet Union we have seen come from a conti-
nental status to a global status. We have seen the rise
of China; we have seen the possibilities of nuclear
proliferation, of international terrorism, and of a whole
series of other things that may affect the lives of
Americans.
Another unique factor that has not existed before
has been the fact that foreign countries today hold huge
amounts of U.S. currency that can be used or invested
in ways that could affect the lives of an American
workman in Portland, Oregon or in Houston, Texas. This
is a totally new factor that has not existed before.
The whole immense field of economic intelligence opens
up. In the past, economic intelligence was always
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regarded as being a sort of part of a military
capabilities study. Today economic intelligence is
a whole science in itself, in finding out how these
monies will be used, what other countries will do.
The very existence of nuclear weapons may create a
situation whereby future wars may be economic in nature
rather than military. For instance, during the oil
embargo, information concerning the policies of the
OPEC countries was more important to us than information
concerning their military establishments. We needed to
know what their pricing policies would be and what
their delivery policies would be. So we have a whole
new world opening up.
Now to get back strictly to the more conventional
aspects of intelligence, what do we see? We see the
Soviet Union today deploying five new types of third
generation inter-continental ballistics missiles, each
one of them more powerful and more accurate than its
predecessors. We see the Soviet Union building large
numbers of submarines capable of launching inter-
continental missiles, more inter-continental missiles
than the previous types of submarines. We see the
Soviet Union basically transforming its navy from a
coast-guard-type navy to a blue-water navy, able to
go anywhere and project Soviet power anywhere in the
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world. We see the Soviets vastly upgrading the
conventional forces they have facing NATO, and facing
China: giving them better equipment, better training,
and the logistical and support units that they did not
have in the past.
Mr. Brezhnev has told us quite plainly that detente
has nothing to do with the Soviet support for wars of
liberation in the class struggle. He served notice on
us of this fact. So we see these capabilities in the
Soviet Union today.
Just to give you an idea of the type of thing that
is happening: in the old days the Soviet submarines had
to come out relatively close to the United States in
order to fire missiles against the United States. Now
they have longer range missiles and they can do this
from the coastal waters of the Soviet Union.
Why do we have intelligence in the form that we do?
Well, if you look at American history you will see that
we have always had good intelligence during our wars and
have always promptly attempted to dismantle it as soon as
the wars were over. This is largely because many of
the people who settled the United States came here from
England at the time of the Civil War when there was the
tradition against the standing army. So in the past
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we built up this capability during the war itself,
because through geography and friends, we had time
to do this. Now Pearl Harbor created a profound impact
in the memory, thee:thnic memory of our people, of being
surprised, and created a commitment that we would not
be surprised again.
I was sent to the U.S. Army's Military Intelligence
Training Center in Camp-.Ritchie in August :1942; the
Commandant of the school was a British colonel. That
was the state. of American intelligence in August 1942.
This is something we have repeated throughout our
history.
Mr. Stimson, who was our Secretary of State in 1932,
on being handed a decoded telegram of a foreign country,
pushed it away saying, "Gentlemen don't read other
gentlemen's mail." Ten years later, as Secretary of War,
he was knee-deep in other gentlemen's mail? Now I don't
blame Mr. Stims,on individually, but that kind of mentality,
led us to Pearl Harbor. At Pearl Harbor we were lucky.
We had the wide oceans, we had Allies who were fighting,
and we had time. And the carriers were out at sea when
the Japanese struck, fortunately.
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We recovered from the naval Pearl Harbor. Could
a nation recover from a nuclear Pearl Harbor? We have
the obligation to have as good intelligence as we can to
make sure that this does not happen to us again.
Now people always think of intelligence as some sort
of means of waging a war, of doing something bad to your
opponent. There are very positive sides to intelligence.
Let me just cite one of them.
We have reached certain agreements with the Soviet
Union on the limitations of strategic arms and thereby
easing some of the burdens on our people. No American
President could sign any such agreement if he did not have
the means of verifying whether that agreement was being
lived up to or not.
In 1960 we had a great debate in-this country about
a missile gap. Was there or was there not a missile gap?
That debate is impossible today: we know how many missiles
they have and, more importantly, they know that we know.
The very existence of an effective, efficient intelligence
capability on the part of the United States is a deterrent
to any nation that might be tempted to move and try a
surprise against us.
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Now how do we collect this intelligence? We
collect this intelligence basically in three ways, but
before I go into that let me just tell you why the CIA
came into being, per se. In 1946 we had a great
Congressional investigation of Pearl Harbor and how it
happened. The general conclusion of that investigation
was that in various parts of the U.S. Government, squirreled
away were pieces of information, which, had they been
brought together in any central point maybe-couldn't have
stopped Pearl Harbor, but could have enabled us to lessen
the damage and the effects of Pearl Harbor. So it was
decided in 1947, by the Congress, to create,under the
National Security Act, the Defense Department on th one
hand and the Central Intelligence Agency on the other-.
And that word "central" refers to what they intended it
to be--the central place for the receipt of information..
Now there is in our American past, or in our
American puritan ethic--and sometimes I've had foreigners
tell me, "You have a little bit of a pharisaical streak
in you"--that intelligence is really dirty business
and we find, pure, noble Americans don't do it. Let
those dirty old British, French, Russians and Germans
do it; but we don't do that sort of thing.
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So what did the Congress say? They created us
to carry out what is basically espionage. But that
isn't what they said in the text of the Act. They
instructed us to do "such other things as the National
Security Council may direct."
You know, we have a great deal of this in us,
this feeling that, no, intelligence isn't real good and
upright and fine. Let me just give you an early example:
Out at CIA we have a statue of Nathan Hale, which was
put there over my protest. I protested, not because he
was not a very brave young man who did not serve his
country loyally, and did not offer an immortal line just
before they hanged him. But I looked at it from the
other side: this was an intelligence agent who was caught
on his first mission and he had all the evidence on him.
Now I am not sure this is what we should be holding up
to our young trainees as an example.
He was sent to Manhattan to-find- out where and
when the British were going to land. Unfortunately,
they were already there. So I wonder about this. But
even he, before he went off on this mission, also
committed a breach of security. He told a friend of his,
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"I am going to Manhattan to spy behind the British
lines." And his friend looked at him and he said,
"Nathan, how could you stoop so low?" So we had this
type of business even then, that this was something
dirty. And you know what he replied? "The need of
the nation makes it necessary."
We've had this in our national background that
we don't do this sort of business. Well this isn't
exactly true. In this Bicentennial Year I have looked
into this a little bit and you would be surprised at
some of the things I've discovered. I discovered, for
instance, that George Washington staged three separate
kidnapping attempts on Benedict Arnold. You know what
he was going to do with him if he got him. The plans didn't
work out. He also attempted to kidnap King George III's
young fourth son, Prince William, who was a midshipman in
the Royal Navy in New York City. There was a shoot-out
outside the Prince's house. Somebody got killed, but
they didn't get the Prince. Fifty years later the American
Minister to Great Britain was talking to King William IV,
who was the midhsipman, and told him the story. And
he said, But, unlike Benedict Arnold, General Washington
had instructed that you be treated with great kindness."
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And the King said, "Well, I am damned glad that he
didn't get a chance to prove it to me."
Then you get this other thing: that you've got
to tell everybody everything--that that's the American
way, that the Founding Fathers wanted everything to be
let out. Well, that is not exactly the case. George
Washington wrote a letter in 1779 to his chief of
intelligence in New Jersey. This is what he said and
I quote: "The need for procuring good intelligence
is so obvious that I have nothing further to add on this
subject. All that remains is for me to tell you that
these matters must be kept completely secret. For lack
of secrecy, these operations, no matter how well planned
or promising the outlook, generally fail. I am, Sir,
your obedient Servant. G. Washington."
On another occasion he spent the night in Connecticut
at the home of a sympathizer, Mr. Holcomb. In the morning
he got up, climbed up on his horse and as he was about to
ride away, Mrs. Holcomb came out and said, "'And pray,
General, where do you ride tonight?" General Washington
leaned down in the saddle and he said, "Madame, can you
keep a secret?" She said, "Of course." He said, "So
can I," and tipped his hat and rode on.
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Then we come to Benjamin Franklin. Now Benjamin
Franklin, for three years before the Revolution, when
we were all loyal subjects of George III, was the
Assistant Postmaster of British North America. Do you
know what he was doing? He was opening that mail-like
crazy. The British caught him and they tried him before
the Privy Council and they fired him. So he went off
and joined the Revolution and went to Paris where he
became the chief American Commissioner of the three
Commissioners who represented the American revolutionaries
in Paris. Promptly, British intelligence totally pene-
trated his office --so much so that when the French told
Franklin that they were coming into the war on the side
of the Revolution, that information was in the hands of
the British government 42 hours later. If you figure
out: riding a horse from Paris to the Channel, crossing
the Channel, riding a horse from Dover to London--that's
about 42 hours.
As a matter of fact, not long ago I had lunch in
Florida with Anthony Eden, who was, as you know, British
Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary. He is now Lord
Avon. He was telling me about an ancestor of his,
Robert Eden, who had a very hard time during the Revolution.
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He lived in Maryland. The Americans seemed to think
he was a British sympathizer and the British seemed to
think he was an American sympathizer. He had problems.
So I said to Anthony Eden, "Yes, but in the meantime
his brother, William Eden, was successfully subverting
Benjamin Franklin's secretary. And he said., "Oh, you
know about that, do you?"
Benjamin Franklin asked the French to build him
a printing press which he had designed. You know what
he printed on the printing press? British currency,
British passports, and fabricated atrocity stories for
insertion in the British press to weaken the British
will to conduct the war.
We go right along. We come down to Mr. Truman
in 1946, who made this statement: "It matters not to
the United States whether its secrets become known
through the actions of spies or through publication.
The damage to the United States is exactly the same in
both cases. And I, for one," said Mr. Truman, 1%do not
believe that our country's interests are served by
going on the basis that everyone has the right to know
all of our secrets."
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To give you an idea: the head of a friendly
European service said to me the other day, You know,
I don't understand why all you Americans aren't
Catholics." I said, "Why? What does that have to
do with it?" "Well," he said, "it is the only religion
that affords confession for everybody," and then he
paused and he said, "but I suppose the fact that it -
-is prvate's the real drawback." We have this
compulsion to tell everybody everything. I have had
foreigners come into my office and say, "I can't believe
it! Down the road there's a roadsign with an arrow
which points and says, 'CIA.'" He said, "It reminds
me of the story of an Italian who was a Neapolitan,
who was recruited by the Soviets. He was trained in
Moscow in shortwave radio, in secret writing with
invisible inks and everything else. Then they said,
'Now you go back to Naples and stay there and when
we are ready, we'll be in touch with you.' So three
years passed and one day this Soviet agent came to
Naples and he looked and the door and he saw 'Agnello'
which was the guy's name, 'Right ground floor.' So
he pushed the button and a guy came to the door and he
said, 'Mr. Agnello?' He said, 'Yes.' He said, 'I am
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from Moscow.' And the man looked at him and he said,
'Oh, I am Agnello, the tailor; you're looking for
Agnello, the spy. He's on the third floor."'
I sometimes wonder whether Agnello wasn't an American.
How do we collect this intelligence? Well, we
collect it in three basic ways. We collect: most of
it overtly; that is, from reading the newspapers; and
from listening to radio broadcasts, both external and
internal--that is, what some of these governments are
telling their own people and sometimes what they are
telling other people in other languages which is not
always the same. And I would say this provides about
50 percent of all the intelligence we get, but it is
clearly the easiest 50 percent. Then we have technology:
the vast technical systems of overhead photography, of
electronics of all sorts. This is one of the areas, I
think, where the United States has made a great contri-
bution to the art, if you will, of intelligence.
I am fond of say that intelligence is the really
the oldest profession even though other people think that
another profession is the oldest one. And my
explanation to that is that before the other profession
could operate, someone had to know where it was and that
is intelligence.
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We have the second type of collection which is
the technical collection. The technology which-took
us to the moon, which took us far out into the system,
has been adapted to make sure that the United States
is not taken by surprise.
And then you get to the final item, which is human
intelligence. Most of the intelligence failures which
you've heard publicized recently in the investigations
and so forth, actually were drawn to the attention of the
Congress by ourselves. In the various cases where we
thought we had failed; in some measure, we did what we
call a post-morten. And we submitted those to the
Congress. You get the impression sometimes that these
were plucked out of our hidden bosom. We submitted them
freely to the Congress. The only trouble is we didn't
do any post-mortems on successes. Now that's a very
difficult thing to make public because if you're finding
out something about somebody and you tell him, he's
going to pull down the blinds or turn out the lights.
You're not going to continue to find out.
President Kennedy once told us, "You are condemned
to be pilloried for your failures and to have your
successes passed over in silence." We accept that.
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The technology and the newspapers will not get
you into a man's head, into what he is thinking, into
his decisions. We can tell a great deal about the
capabilities, but telling about decisions, only people
can tell you.
For instance, the last Yom Kippur war: we knew
exactly what forces were present on both sides of that
canal. They had been for months, ready to go. But we
were not into the decision which was held to a very
small number of people, of the Egyptians and the Syrians,
to go at two o'clock in the afternoon of the sixth of
October. We had had a report earlier that it was going
to happen on this day, but my experience has been that
analysts sometimes shrink from predicting the worst.
There is a fear of crying "wolf" and being accused of it,
and there is a belief that a rational man won't start a
war knowing he's going to lose it. But, of course, there
are new things now: you start a war knowing you're going
to lose it in order to provoke international intervention
which will get you something that you couldn't have won
through the force of arms. In the old days it was perfectly
rational to presume that nobody would start a war he
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expected to lose. So you've got the element of
irrationality that enters into this. Only people
can tell you about people.
So we have, what I call, this clandestine intelli-
gence or espionage, if you will. This is not an unique
American discovery, this has been going on since Moses
sent twelve spies into the land of Canaan. In my belief,
it is the oldest profession of all.
What does this intelligence cost you taxpayers
Well, the budget of the CIA and the Intelligence Community
is not published. That does not mean that it is not
controlled. The budget at the CIA goes through exactly
the same process as does the budget of the Department of
Agriculture or Health, Education and Welfare. We are
given, on the direction of the President, an overall
figure from the Office of Management and Budget. We
then draw up our program and we take it down to the
Appropriations Committee of the House and Senate; we
take it to the Armed Service Committee of the House and
Senate; we take it to the Government Operations Committee
of the House and Senate; and, for some things, we take
it to the Foreign Relations Committees. Now all our
oversight committees put together add up to half the
membership of both houses of Congress.
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One of the most prevalent diseases, however, I have
found in Washington--it may result from the swampy
ground and everything--is selective amnesia. The number
of people who do not remember that we've told them certain
things is absolutely astounding. It's a very unusual
disease and highly prevalent in Washington.
We go through the same process as everybody else.
They ask us, "Why are you doing this? What is this
program? What is that program? Why isn't this program
better than that program?" This is simply not made
public. Why? Well, if the budget of the CIA was made
public the Capitol dome wouldn't fall down. But if I
knew the budget of the KGB year after year, I could follow
all major programs.
Let me give you an example: If our budget had been
made public, you would have seen the U-2 plane in it,
and you would have seen the project that raised the sub-
marine. The minute that bulge in the budget showed, you
would begin the unraveling process. Why is that there?
What is it for? That is the simple reason why it is not.
But a large percentage of the Congress is fully aware of
the budget and it is debated, cut, and argued over just
the way any other budget is put through Congress.
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In light of the panorama of the world I have just
described to you, let me just give you a few facts.
Less than one penny out of every dollar spent by the
United States Government goes for intelligence. Since
1969, in spite of the increasing threats in the world,
and the increasing capabilities of other countries of
the dangers of nuclear proliferation and terrorism,
the manpower devoted to intelligence in the United States
Government has gone down 40 percent, which causes us to
rely more on friendly foreign services. S_ome_of them:
are very good and their interests are the same as ours:
they want to preserve their freedom just as we want to
preserve our freedom.
Now one of the problems we had durin gall these
investigations was: were we going to uncover foreign services? We
were able to work out, with Congress, something to the
effect that we would not be free to publicize secrets
that were not American, that were given to us by the
service of another country. This has worked out very
satisfactorily and we have not uncovered our relation-
ships with the intelligence services of friendly foreign
countries.
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Now what about these investigations? Do they
have a positive aspect? Yes, they do have some positive
aspect. First of all, I can't tell you that there have
not been abuses in the Intelligence Community. I am not
going to talk about the other agencies, I am just going
to talk about CIA. Seventy-six thousand people have
passed through the CIA since 1947. Now I cannot tell you
that among those 76,000 people we have not had some kooks,
some zealots, some people who have shown eminently bad
judgment. We have. But I submit that if you took any
other group of 76,000 people and submitted them to the
kind of scrutiny to which we have been submitted, our
record would not look that bad. Because, as of today,
in spite of all the innuendo and accusations, not one
person in the CIA has been indicted for any crime against
the laws of the United States.
You heard about assassinations. What was the end
conclusion? That-nobody was assassinated. You heard
about the toxins: we discovered the toxins stored away
and we went to the Congress and told them they were there.
Why were they there? Because in the 1950s the Russians
killed a number of people in West Germany with toxins.
We were afraid it might be used against us and we ought
to have the means to retaliate if it were. S o a lot-of
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study was done and this was what the toxins were
developed for. Very much the same thing for the
drug experiments. Somebody obviously showed incredible
stupidity in giving this LSD to this man without his
knowledge, the man that subsequently committed suicide.
Why did we do this? We saw a man. like Cardinal
Mindszenty in Hungary who had resisted every torture
and pressure from the Nazis and suddenly the Communists
bring him forward, hollow-eyed, to confess to every
crime in the book. The people who were old enough to
remember thought this was done with mind-bending drugs.
We all did. We looked into it; not just the CIA, the
Armed Services, the National Institutes of Health and
a lot of other people who didn't think there was anything
particularly immoral about this particular thing.
The United States had renounced the use of poison
gas between the two wars, but that didn't prevent the
United States from manufacturing nine million poison
gas shells to use in World War II, in case it was used
against us.
I am not trying to tell you we haven't had abuses
and I am not trying to tell you that we don't understand
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that we must run an Agency in conformity with the
standards the American people are prepared to accept
now. We just hope they find some effective means of
telling us when they change they change their opinion
about what should be done.
The othe'r day we had a group of Congressmen out
at CIA and someone said, "Well, if somebody could have
assassinated Hitler in 1944 or 1945, he would undoubtedly
have been the first joint recipient of the Congressional
Medal of Honor and the Victoria Cross. And one of the
young Congressmen said, "Yes, but if you could have
got him in '35 or '36, think how many lives you would
have saved!" I said, "Congressman, do I understand
you are advocating assassination in peacetime?" "Oh,"
he said, "no, that's different." Well, it was different
because we know what happened following that.
But we understand that we must operate within the
norms of what the American people want. We think
the President's Order on Restrictions, the reorganization
making the Director of Central Intelligence the President's
principal advisor on intelligence, setting 'up a strengthened
Inspector General in every part of the Intelligence
Community. Andeven,above that, setting up an oversight
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board composed of three distinguished citizens and
everybody in every intelligence organization is told
that if he has any doubt about what he is doing to
go to that oversight board and tell them that he thinks
he is being asked to do something illegal or improper.
We have a Committee on Foreign Intelligence that
will give us the order of priorities in which they will
want to know things, and tell us in a general way what
resources we should expend on the various things they
want us to do.
I think we have, for the immediate future, a charter.
But, we live with this peculiar puritanical view of intel-
ligence as being something wrong and, on the whole, of
the way we look at people.
The head of a friendly foreign service told me this
story: On an island in the Pacific three guys were
washed ashore after a shipwreck. One was a Frenchman,
one was an Englishman, and one was an American. The King
of the cannibals who captured them said, "I have bad news-
and good news. The bad news is that we are going to have
you for lunch tomorrow. The good news is that in the
meantime I will give you anything you want, short of
setting you free." So he turned to the Frenchman and he
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said, "What do you want?" The Frenchmen said, "Well,
if you're going to have me for lunch tomorrow, I would
just as soon spend my remaining hours with that beauti-
ful 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 to the Englishman, "What do you
want?" The Englishman said, "I want a pen and paper."
They said, " Wliy :do you want a pen and paper?" He
said, "I want to write a letter to the Secretary General
of the United Nations and protest against the unjust,
unfair, and unsporting attitude you have demonstrated
towards us." So they gave the Englishman a hut and
they gave him pen and paper and he started to write.
Then they turned to the American and they said, "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 the vice-chief, "That's
a weird request, but the Americans are a weird bunch and
since we promised, we'll do it." So they untied the
American, they led him into the middle of the village,
they made him kneel down, and the biggest cannibal took
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a running leap and kicked the American in the rear end.
As the American sprawled out, he took out a Tommy gun
that he had hidden under his clothes. He 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 the jut and they looked
at the American standing there with the smoking Tommy gun
and they said, "You mean to say you had that weapon the
whole time?" The American said, "Sure." They said, "Why
didn't you use it before now? Then my European friend
telling me the story said, "The American looked at them
with an expression of hurt sincerity, and he said, 'But
you don't understand; it wasn't until he kicked me in the
rear end that I had any moral justification for such
extreme action."'
Bearing these things in mind, we go forward. I am
sure that American people understand that the real issue
facing them is not the occasional and very small number
of abuses which have been distorted out of all proportion,
most of which occurred 20 or 25 years ago. The real issue
before the American people, as we move into the last
quarter of this century is: will we have eyes to see
and ears to hear or will we stumble forward blindly into the
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future until the day we have to choose between abject
humiliation and nuclear blackmail? We know the
responsibility we owe the American people: to tell
them to the best of our ability what lies ahead. We
will do our best not to let you down.
Thank you very much.
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