SPEECH BY LT. GENERAL VERNON A. WALTERS BEFORE THE UNION LEAQUE CLUB CIA AND WORLD AFFAIRS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80R01731R002000120001-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 27
• Document Creation Date: December 14, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 4, 2002
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: March 5, 1976
• Content Type: SPEECH

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SPEECH
by
LT. GENERAL VERNON A. WALTERS
before
THE INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF FLORIT.)A
CIA AND WORLD AFFAIRS
Miami, Florida
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Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am delighted to be here and to have an
opportunity to talk to you a little bit about some-
thing which most of my 35 years in Government have
been specifically addressed to and that is, xiamely,
the question of intelligence.
I :think that one of the great questir,~ns that
people ask all the time is: What is this intelligence
about which people talk so much; what is it rind what
does it mean to the United States. Well, intelligence
is information on actions, capabilities, int~antions--
political, military, economic and financial-??of foreign
countries that may have some impact on our l:i_ves. It
may affect our living in some way. We have always set
up a good intelligence service during our wars and we
have almost always systematically destroyed :i.t as soon
as the war was over. This time we waited a :Little
longer because we had the Korean War and the Vietnamese
War.
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In 1942 I was sent to the U.S- Army's Military
Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie, Maryland.
You know who the Commandant was? A British colonel! That
was the state of American intelligence in August 1942.
Now the last great investigation we had was in
1946 to ascertain what had happened at Pearl Harbor. And
this uncovered the fact that various people in various parts
of the U.S. Government had information which, had it all
been brought together in one place, might have enabled us
not to avoid Pearl Harbor but at least to minimize its
effects. And so it was decided in 1947 by the Congress to
create a central place, the Central Intelligence Agency,
which would be the central repository or the place where all
this intelligence would come in and be evaluated and
passed on to the policymakers in the United States. We
were created by the National Security Act of 1947 which
set up the Defense Departmen-~; that is one of the
reasons why our primary oversight committees in the Congress
are the Armed Services Committees.
Now, we were created obviously for the purpose of
engaging in espionage. But you know that we .Nmericans have
a certain pharisaical streak in our national character
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which says, "All of this is all right for the dirty old
British, French, Russians and Germans, but we pure
Americans don't do things like that." So what the law
said was that the CIA would do "such other t~iings as the
National Security Council might direct." Th~r.oughout our_
past in the United States we have had this thing about
.ourselves that really the Founding Fathers wouldn't have
liked all this stuff and would have wanted tp let it all
hang out,-but this is just not historically correct.
George Washington, for instance, organized three
separate kidnapping attempts on Benedict Arnold. And I think
we all know what he was going to do with him .when he got
him. George Washington was one of the great users of
intelligence in American history, and he had a very tough
situation. Fie had a very small Army, facing a great world
power and a very, very tough situation indeed. Now he
wrote a letter to his chief of intelligence :~.n New Jersey, a
Colonel Elias Dayton, and this is what he said literally:
"The need for procuring good intelligence is so obvious
that I have nothing further to add on this subject. All
that remains for me is to tell you that these' matters must
be kept .entirely secret. For lack of such secrecy i,hese
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enterprises, no matter how promising the outlook, generally
fail. I am sir, your obedient servant, G. Washington."
Now, one more little story about Washington. He
spent the night in Connecticut at the home o:f a sympathizer,
a Mr. Holcomb. In the morning when he was leaving., he got
up on his horse and Mrs. Holcomb came out to say goodbye
to him. She said, "And pray, General, where do you ride
tonight?" He leaned down in the saddle and said, Madame,
can you keep a secret?" And she said, ':'Of course."' He
said, "So can I, Madame." He tipped his hat and rode off.
So all this business that the Founding Fathers
wanted us to tell everybody everything is just not historically
accurate.
Mr. Truman, in 1956, said, "It matters not to the
United States whether its secrets become known through the
action of spies or through publication. The damage to the
United States in both cases is the same. An