TEXT OF ADDRESS BY LT. GEN. VERNON A. WALTERS DEPUTY DIRECTOR, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80R01731R002000120007-4
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 28
• Document Creation Date: December 14, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 6, 2002
• Sequence Number: 7
• Publication Date: January 26, 1976
• Content Type: SPEECH

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TEXT OF ADDRESS
BY
LT. GEN. VERNON A. WALTERS
DEPUTY DIRECTOR, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
NATIONAL SECURITY SEMINAR
at
FREEDOM STUDIES CENTER
Boston, Virginia
January ig, 27, 1976
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Well, I'm very delighted to have this opportunity to be here
and talk with you tonight. 'I talk with some awe and with some mis-
givings. I see some very distinguished people in the audience.
Just before dinner I was recalling to General Lemnitzer that some
?
years ago as a young Lieutenant Colonel in the NATO Standing Group
I was asked to go and brief a number of very senior retired generals -
to welcome them. I went over there, and I thought I did all right.
But then they began to nail me to the floor, asking me how does the
Alliance go to war. Well, this is a rather difficult question to
answer, so I danced around a little bit on that and left quite crest-
fallen, thinking I hadn't done very well. And I will never forget -
and I still have it - I got a letter from the Chief of Staff of the
United States Army, telling me I hadn't done as badly as I'd thought.
So I hope he will be as indulgent with me this time as he was that time.
You mentioned that the Central Intelligence Agency is under the
hottest attack. But I think there should be no mistake. We are just
at this point taking the fire that was intended for everybody. When
they say the Central Intelligence Agency shouldn't do it because it's
the FBI's job, they don't really want the FBI to do it either. And
really, I believe we are witnessing a massive attack on American intel-
ligence,, an attempt to create a group who should be shunned by their
fellow Americans, a whole pariah caste. I don't want to get too much
into being very defensive about this.
But you've heard all about the assassinations. What was the
final conclusion?. Nobody was assassinated.
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You've heard all about the toxins. What was the final conclusion?
They were never given.
You all saw everybody brandishing the dart gun. The conclusion
was they were never used.
Why did we get into those things? Because the Soviet Union was
doing them.
People say why did you get into the drug testing program? Well,
we saw a man like Cardinal Mindzenty who had resisted every kind of
pressure in imprisonment by the Nazis. Then suddenly he appears before
the movie cameras, hollow-eyed, to confess everything that his communist
captors wanted him to confess. And we wondered how this was done.
Those of us who are old enough to remember are convinced it was done
with mindbending drugs. And if it was done that way, we had to know
about it to be able to defend ourselves and, if need be, to retaliate.
And it wasn't just ?the Armed Forces or the CIA who were doing
drug experimentation. Many distinguished American universities and the
National Institute for Health were doing it at that time. But nobody
saw anything morally wrong with that.
The trouble is people don't remember today the strength of our
commitment after Pearl Harbor: never to be surprised again. They don't
remember today the strength of our commitment to stop the menace of
communist expansion. And anybody who attempts to judge the past by
looking through the perceptions of the present is not only going to
fail to read the past; he's not going to understand tomorrow.
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And that is a very dangerous thing. We live in a different
kind of world than has gone on in the past. President Madison once
said that he hadn't heard from his minister in Spain in two years, and
if he didn't hear from him pretty soon he was going to send somebody to
see what was going on in Spain.
We live in a time of instant communications. We live in a time
when the policy makers have to make decisions immediately, on the basis
of the information that is pouring in and crashing around their ears
while they're trying to reflect on what they have to do.
This is a totally different kind of world. It's a world of
instant information. In the old days there was a reflective pause be-
fore you decided what you were going to do about things. When George
Washington said, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," he was
talking about a United States that had a two months' cushion on either
side of it. In the later period of our history, World Wars I and II,
the world was not bi-polarized or tri-polarized. There were many other
large powers between us and the aggressor. And we faced a different
thing. Germany, even at its wildest, was never anything other than a
European power.
The Soviet Union is a global power and is becoming more global
every day. If we fight tomorrow, it will be the first time since
Valley Forge we will fight someone who controls more resources than
we do. The Soviet Union. And what the Soviet Union has today, China
will have tomorrow.
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I think this is one area in which we must be careful not to
let ourselves be deceived. In my opinion, there is no doubt the
Chinese are simply using us as the far barbarians against the near
barbarians, who are the Soviet Union. If you look and see what the
?
Chinese are telling tbeir own people about their relationship with
the United States, anybody who thinks they have any fraternal feel-
ing for us, or any feeling of comradeship with us - is due for a
sad disappointment. They passed a paper around among their cadres
explaining why "they let Nixon come to China." And this is quite
explicit. It was the using of the far barbarians against the near
barbarians.
Today intelligence, because of this time factor gap, is more
important than ever before. And the timeliness of intelligence
is more important than ever before. Because if it isn't timely, it
isn't intelligence. It's history. There is no use getting what
was going on a month ago, or a week ago. You've got to have a contin-
uous flow of timely information.
But where do we see this massive attack? We see it on the eyes
and the ears of the United States.
If you take a giant, he is a fearsome person. But if you blind-
fold that giant, he may be as helpless as a child. In my opinion, one
of the great things we have to do is just not stand still to have the
blindfold put on our eyes. And an attempt is being made to put the
blindfold on our eyes. An attempt is being made to criticize, to
stifle, and to discredit - not just the CIA - all intelligence.
Today I saw that one of the Congressional Committees voted to
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abolish a whole element of intelligence in the Defense Department.
This is based on the expertise of three months.
One must marvel at the expertise of these people. We had an
investigator come out and see us, a young lady from one of the
Congressional Committees who was their security officer. This was
her first job in her whole life. And she was the security officer
in one of the Congressional Committees investigating us. So one
must marvel at the ability to pick these people with this prescience.
And one of the reasons that this is going on, in my view, is
that intelligence is knowledge. And knowledge is power. And he
who holds intelligence holds knowledge. And he who holds knowledge
holds power.
And, again, if you can in some way damage the flow, interrupt
the flow, discredit the flow of knowledge, you will bewilder your
opponent.
And we are witnessing this on an international scale, not tust a
national scale. It's occurring in other countries as well. Right
now, the former chief of the Italian Intelligence Service is in jail.
There have been these kind of assaults on various parts of the intel-
ligence services of various of the Western countries, that bother
these people.
And one thing that I think is very important is that good
intelligence contributes to the deterrent. If they know that we
know it, it will inhibit what they do. If they are certain that
we are able to follow what they're doing, this will certainly have
a deterrent effect on what they are going to do. The difficulty of
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cheating, if. it becomes clear to them that we know they're cheating,
is it's going to inhibit them or cause them to spend more resources to
be more skillful in hiding their cheating.
Good intelligence enables you to gauge how much is enough
?
for your own defense budget, so that you aren't building up against
an unknown quantity which would require you to make a maximum effort
and perhaps turn us into a garrison state, which we couldn't do poli-
tically. But if you have good intelligence and you have some idea of
the order of magnitude of what you may have to deal with, then you can
in some way measure your response to it, without impoverishing yourself.
After all, they have a much more tightly controlled society. They can
impose sacrifices on their people that they can observe. If anybody
gets out of line, you just shoot them. It's very simple. That's
the way they handle these things. They can impose sacrifices on their
people that we can't hope, in a democratic society, to impose. And
I think this gives them the advantage of trying to spend us, if possible,
into the poorhouse. Because the poorhouse to us, if it was the same as
a poorhouse to them, would be an unbelievable situation to us. Their
people have lived all their adult lives with famines and starvations
and everything else. And they have an ability to absorb this sort of
stuff which we do not.
Now as we look around, we hear the kind words of detente. But
what do we see? We see almost a maximum effort on the part of the
Soviet Union in every area that you can think of. We see the Soviets
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deploy five new types of missiles, third generation missiles. And who
knows, they may be glimmering of some more coming along the road. We
see these missiles equipped with multiple warheads. We see the Soviets
making the same kind of an effort in the field of their conventional
forces. In their Navy. The Soviet Navy used to be within recent years
a coastal navy. The Soviet Navy is now able to project its strength all
over the world. The Soviet Navy is showing the flag all over the world.
The Soviets are developing high performance aircraft of all sorts which
they are not chary of giving out to their friends and allies. And Mr.
Brezhnev has told us, and many of us will not listen. He has told us
that he's all for detente. But he's told us that they see nothing in-
compatible between detente and their support of national wars of liber-
ation. And he added, "Because with each victory of one of these wars
of national liberation, our strength grows vis-a-vis the imperialist
camp." That's about as plain a notice as you can get. He's not
deceiving us.
I was saying during the dinner to one of my friends, "One of my
Brazilian friends once said to me, 'You can trust the communists.' And
when I looked shocked, he said, 'Yes, they really are."
And sometimes we get these interpretations that they're not
really - that they're thinking of something else, and everything else.
But if you think of the percentage - and this is a very difficult
question which I'm not going to get involved in today - of the total
cost of Soviet expenditures. There are so many standards by which you
can organize this, and everything else. My personal conviction is that
the Soviets are spending more money than we are out of a gross national
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product less than half as big as ours. Now I'm not going to attempt to
put this into dollars or costing or anything else. Because in the
United States, when the United States builds a missile in Huntsville,
Alabama, and puts it on the Florida railroad to send it to Cape Kennedy,
the U.S. Government pays the railroad to boot.
In the Soviet Union, where the Soviet government controls all the
means of production, distribution, and transportation, this is just going
from one Soviet pocket to the other. Okay, some part of it comes out of
the gross national effort, but it's very, very difficult - and this is
a tremendously moot question within the intelligence community today -
the exact measure. And I personally don't believe you can get any exact
measure. I would say that in gross terms I think the Soviet Union is
spending more money on defense than we are. And it's doing it out of a
gross national product, as I say, less than half of ours. This is a real-
ity of life, whether we like it or not.
Now, put this aside. Granted that this may not be their intentions,
but the sacrifice imposed on them to build up this kind of a force is
enormous. Now some people will say, "But they won't use it because
that will set off a nuclear war." Well, I don't believe they may neces-
sarily use it militarily. But whatever people tell you, my impression
is that the perception of three is more than the perception of two. And
frankly, I think what they're trying to play with us is a sort of chess
game. You don't, like in checkers, jump the man and take him off the
board. You create a situation, he looks at it, and he says "Check."
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In my opinion, the Soviets have never forgotten the various times
they've had to back down, on Berlin and other places, and the humiliation
it brought them. And in my opinion, they have absolutely resolved that
this is not going to happen to them again.
It reminds me of a wonderful story of Winston Churchill on :the
night of the 10th of May, 1941, when he stood on the roof of the Air
Ministry in Kings Way in London and watched London burn. And someone
said, "Prime Minister, what do you think of it?" He said, "It's a
terrifying spectacle, because nobody will ever see it again."
In my opinion, the Soviets have said this about their past
humiliations. They've looked at them, and they've said, "This is not
going to happen to us again."
From the way they've been building up their forces, I'm not
sure that it will happen to them again.
Now, how do we collect this intelligence? Well, an enormous
amount of intelligence is collected overtly - through the press, through
broadcasts, and through other things. I'm fond of saying that if you
read the Minsk Pravda long enough, you can find out a great deal about
what's happening in the Belorussian Republic, and consequently in the
Soviet Republic. And if you have people doing this for a long time, they
develop a sense. They can sense shifts. They can sense priorities.
They can sense movements of various kinds.
And then, of course, we collect it technically. And I think this
is one of the two great contributions America has made to intelligence,
which I always claim is the oldest profession in the world, because
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before the one that's claimed to be the oldest profession could operate,
somebody had to know where it was. And that required intelligence.
So we collect it technically. And we adapted the genius that
has made us the only people to walk the silent face of the moon to
?
the technical collection of intelligence. And it is done in absolutely
mindboggling ways.
But in a closed society like the Soviet Union, you can get in on
a great many things with technical intelligence. But it's hard to get
into the decision process. And it's hard to get under a roof. And for
that you need people.
After all, if somebody would tell you what is going on somewhere,
it could save you an extremely expensive technical system to find out what's
going on there. And I think we have done well in marrying the two -
in using the technical to vector the human sources into further collection
an that particular subject. I think that we have been able through human
sources sometimes to pinpoint things that we could then use our technical
means to find out. And it is a happy marriage.
The James Bond facet of intelligence is enormously exaggerated.
In fact, I always say we carry the cross of James Bond around our neck.
Not that some of this isn't necessary. Some of it is necessary. But
it provides a totally distorted view of intelligence. At the present
time five to six percent of our budget is going into this type of intel-
ligence as compared to other parts of intelligence. But, of course,
this is the one that titillates the public fancy, and this is the one
that gets all the attention from the media and so forth because it's
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the most exciting. We need all of these means of collecting intelli-
gence because the target is multiple. The target is worldwide. And
the target is constantly changing.
But one of the big problems we have is back at the beginning -
efforts to blind our intelligence. There is one subject to which I
return constantly. And those of you who may have heard me before will
probably be nauseated by it. And that is what I am fond of calling
the new forms of war.
The new forms of war are basically founded upon a book written
25 centuries ago by a Chinese scholar called Sun-tzu. Now the book
has been translated into English, but reading the book - it's in
the form of the Chinese dialogue. And this is not easy because Chinese
dialogues are sort of like this: "If I don't want you to go to Paris,
I tell him not to go to London." But since we're all Chinese we under-
stand there's an indirection. And the real message gets through. But
if you're not Chinese, it requires a lot of interpretation. I always
say that reading the translation of Sun-tzu is like swimming in a
pool full of maple syrup. It's hard to do.
But Sun-tzu set it all out for us. Not long ago the German
Service gave me a beautiful edition of Sun-tzu that was put out by
the East German Service for the indoctrination of the East German for-
ces in Berlin. And it says it all. It's all there.
He starts out with this general consideration. Fighting is the
crudest form of making war that there is. Then he goes on to tell you
how to undo your enemies. Number one: Cover with ridicule everything
that is valid in your opponent's culture. Number two: Implicate their
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leaders in criminal enterprises and at the right time turn them over
to the scorn of their fellow countrymen. Number three: Aggravate by
every means at your disposal all of the existing differences in your
opponent's country. Number four: Agitate the young against the old.
And he goes on with others. He says, "Weaken the enemy's will to
resist with sensuous music." You might say drugs.
All of this can be adapted and brought up to date. But then he
brings you to this conclusion, "The supreme excellence is not to win
. a hundred victories in a hundred battles. The supreme excellence is to
?
subdue your enemy's armies without ever having to fight them."
They know that a nuclear war would be intolerable in various
forms of it. In my opinion, they do not intend to have one. They
intend, as Lenin said, "The capitalists would do business with us.
They would even sell us the rope with which we're going to hang them."
And this is what they're working for. It has been proved by
history that you cannot stop the United States from the outside. It
has also, unfortunately, been proved by recent history that you can
stop it from the inside.
And, in my opinion, this is a new form of war which we as a
people do not yet understand. We do not understand the nature of the
means by which this is exercised. I can't prove this to you. But I
am absolutely certain that a large part of the so-called New Left is
doing the Soviet Union's work without realizing that it's doing it.
Now, they're all saying, "Oh, we're against both super imperialist powers."
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But let's see what they do. They denounce the Russians, and
they denounce us. But they've kidnapped Americans. They've killed
Americans. They've bombed American embassies. They've hijacked
American aircraft. Have they ever done any of these things to the
Soviet Union?
?
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In my opinion, the Soviet Union pushes, nudges gently, the
New Left in the right direction. As long as they're doing what the
Soviet Union wants in a gentle way. And it's a much looser control.
I don't believe it's a centralized control. I believe it is orchestrated.
It says, "Violins up, wind down." And because they do not have direct
controls over these things, it's extremely skillfully done. It is
difficult to get the evidence. People always say, "Where's your
evidence? Where's your evidence? Where's your evidence?" Well,
your evidence is very hard to get. But if you apply the pragmatic
principle, Qui Bono, who benefits from it. I would say that every-
thing the New Left fights against benefits the Soviet Union.
Now, I can't tell you I know the name of the guy who tells
the Socialist Workers Party, or something else, to do this, that,
and the other. Nevertheless, in my belief, this is the way the thing
is being orchestrated. This is the way it's being run. And they have
a very ripe ground in America.
We have this deep puritan ethic in our national life. A French
.friend told me a great story. Some of you may have heard it again.
And if so, I apologize.
He said, "On an island in the Pacific, the cannibals captured
three guys. One was an American. One was a Frenchman. And one was
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an Englishman.
"And the cannibal chief said to them, 'I have bad news and good
news for you. The bad news is we're going to have you all for lunch
tomorrow. The good news is I'll give you anything you want, short of
setting you free in the meantime.'
"So he turned to the Frenchman, and he said, 'What do you want?'
"And the Frenchman said, 'Well, if I'm going to be executed in
the morning, I think I'd just as soon spend my remaining hours with that
beautiful cannibal girl over there.'
"So they said, 'Okay.' And they untied him. And he and the canni-
bal girl went off into the woods.
"Then they said to the Englishman, 'What do you want?'
"And the Englishman said, 'I want a pen and paper.'
"And they said, 'What do you want a pen and paper for?'
"He said, 'I want to write a letter to Secretary General Waldheim
to protest against the unfair, unjust, and unsporting attitude you have
adopted towards us.'
"Okay,' They gave him a hut and a pen and a paper, and he
started to write.
"Then they said to the American, 'What do you want?'
"The American said, 'I want to be led into the middle of the
village and I want to be made to kneel down. And I want the biggest
cannibal here to kick me in the rear end.'
"And they said, 'It's a pretty odd request, but the Americans
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are a pretty odd bunch. And I promise that we'll do it.'
"So they led the American into the middle of the village. They
made him kneel down. The biggest cannibal took a flying leap, kicked,
and knocked him fifteen feet. Now the American had been hiding a
submachine gun under his clothes. So he took out the submachine gun,
and he cut down the near right cannibal, and the rest fled. The
Frenchman, hearing the gunfire, came out of the woods. The English-
man, hearing the gunfire, came out of the hut. And they looked at
the American standing there with a smoking pistol in his hand, and
they said, 'You mean to say you had that thing the whole time?'
"He said, 'Sure.'
"They said, 'Why the heck didn't you use it before now?'
"The American looked at them with an expression of deep sincer-
ity, 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."
And they know this. And they use it. Right now, if you look
at American history, we've always developed good intelligence during
our wars, and we've always immediately wrecked it thereafter. As a
young Second Lieutenant I was sent to the U.S. Army Intelligence
Training Center at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, in 1942. The Commandant
of the U.S. Army's Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchey in 1942
was a British Colonel. That was the state of American intelligence
at the outbreak of the war. The first ten training films I saw were
all British.
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Now the wreckers have taken a little longer because we've had
the Korean War and the Vietnam War. But the wreckers are there at work
now, trying to demolish this intelligence capability. They're trying
to tell us that the Founding Fathers wouldn't have liked this.
Well, in this Bicentennial year, I've done some research on the
Founding Fathers and found some interesting things, some of you may
have heard of before. George Washington organized three separate
kidnap attempts on Benedict Arnold. And I think we all know what he
was going to do with him when he got him.
He also organized a kidnap attempt on Prince William of Britain,
who was George III's fourth son, who later became King William IV, who
was then a midshipman in the Royal Navy in New York. Matter of fact,
there was a scuffle outside the Prince's house, and somebody got killed.
George did send word, however, that he didn't want the Prince harmed.
But he didn't send that word for Benedict Arnold.
George Washington wrote a letter to his chief of intelligence
in New Jersey, Colonel Elias Dayton, in 1779, and this is what he said:
"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 as secret as possible.
For lack of secrecy, these enterprises generally fail, no matter
haw promising the outlook or how well planned. I am, sir, your obedi-
ent servant, George Washington."
Then we have this thing now, you must tell everybody everything.
Well, George Washington spent the night at a sympathizer's house. And
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In the morning as he was leaving, he got up on his horse to ride off.
And the sympathizer's wife came out and said, "General, it was great
to have you. Where are you riding tonight?"
And he leaned down in his saddle, and he said, "Madam, can
you keep a secret?"
And she said, "Yes."
He said, "So can I. Good day."
And he rode off.
So, we have all this nonsense about how it is the American tradi-
tion to tell everybody everything, and so forth.
Well, you go to Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin was the
Assistant Postmaster for North America from 1772 to 1775, when every-
body was a loyal subject of George III. What was he doing as Assistant
Postmaster of North America? He was reading that British mail like
crazy. We were at peace. We weren't at war. So he got fired. But
he went to Paris, and in Paris he had the French build him a printing
press. And what did he print on the printing press? Well, he printed
British currency, British passports, and fabricated atrocity stories,
while fending off the approaches of Anthony Eden's great-great-grand-
father, who was trying to subvert him for British intelligence.
As a matter of fact, curiously, in Florida the other day I had
lunch with Mr. Eden, - Lord Avon as he is now - and I mentioned this.
And he said, "Oh, you know that?"
It's a very interesting thing. His great-great-grandfather was
working very hard on subverting Benjamin Franklin.
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And yet the odd thing is that we have this lessened perception
today of threat. And the threat is greater than at any time in Ameri-
can history. The United States has always been so far away that it was
unreachable, and therefore unbeatable. That's no longer the case. And
yet this is the time in which probably, since World War II, we have less
perception of threat. And the potential enemy we face has greater
forces than anybody we've seen since our independence. And yet we do
not have any particular perception of danger.
Now everybody gives lip service to power second to none. But
some of the people in Congress who mouth this all the time are the ones
who are carrying the largest meat ax when it comes to striking at what
is necessary to achieve power second to none.
One of the things that concerns me tremendously at the present
time is the perception abroad of the United States. Now the greatest
treasure almost in international life and policy that a nation has is its
credibility. It wasn't until Britain and France had given Hitler the
Rhineland, the Saar, Austria, the Sudetenland, and all of Czechoslovakia,
and had totally lost their credibility that the Germans were prepared
to take the gamble on Poland.
We have already given the Soviets four green lights. Vietnam,
Cambodia, Laos, and now Angola. And the perception that I call the
Portuguese perception of the United States - if you travel abroad a
great deal as I do - and we hide this from the American people - the
American people still presume the United States to be the paramount mil-
itary country in the world and to be recognized as so by all. Well, it
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may be recognized by some, but this perception is shrinking rapidly.
? People are getting the impression that the United States is in such
disarray that even though it may have impressive forces, they haven't
got the will or the resolution to use them.
And they have things like you see going on now. We want to do
something in Angola. Zap! It's voted out and prohibited.
Let me just read you what some of our best friends have said.
And I'm not reading from newspapers that are hostile to us. I'm read-
ing from newspapers that are friendly to us, like the London Daily
Telegraph. This is what the London Daily Telegraph said. It's
a long one. I'm only going to read you an extract. After describing
what's going on in the United States, they say:
"No morals are driven home by this woeful tale. One is for
America herself. She must find effective means of keeping her secrets
and of punishing those who for gain or notariety disclose and publish
them.
"The other is for America's friends. They must look urgently to
their own defense and security, for little help is for the time being
to be expected from a country so sadly distracted and at war with
itself in which no man can become eminent or important without being
drowned in mud, ridicule, and calumny.
"And meanwhile, quietly and ruthlessly, without any such fuss
or self-mutilation, Russia extends her grim sway."
Ii Giornale, an Italian newspaper, very friendly to the United
States, describing this same thing says:
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"We see a spectacle in the United States where her intelligence
officers are being published in lists, like bandits whom the sheriff
is supposed to hunt down."
Let me give you another quote from the Daily Telegraph:
"America is accustomed to and has merited a good deal of
deference from her allies. But deference can be a disservice. The
United States should know that her European cousins and allies are
appalled and disgusted by the present open disarray in her public life.
The self criticism and self destructive tendencies are running mad,
with no countervailing force in sight. She has no foreign policy any-
more because Congress will not allow it. Her intelligence arm, the CIA,
is being gutted and rendered inoperative. The names of the staff are
being published so they can be murdered."
Now these are our friends. Now imagine the dubious people. Now
the French always expressed a lot of doubts about whether we were really
going to defend them. What frightens them now is that what they've been
saying all along may be true.
And this is their concern. Because the day this perception of
American impotence becomes generalized, a lot of our friends are going
tb start looking around to accommodation of one sort or another. And
I think, as Secretary Schlesinger ?said so aptly the other day, "If
we are not willing to defend anything but North America, soon we will
have nothing but North America to defend."
And this will imply a militarized state as far as we're concerned
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if we intend to survive in that kind of an atmosphere.
It Is a disturbing panorama that we see everywhere around us.
And yet, as I say, the problem is to attain some kind of perception
for this immense potential that is arrayed against us. We have enor-
mous questions to answer for which the American people are looking to
us for an answer. In my opinion, we have four vital questions to an-
swer. The first is, who will be in control of the Soviet Union five
years from today, and what will be their dispositions towards us and
towards our allies? Second, what is there in Soviet Research and De-
velopment today? This is a subject dear to my heart and my friend
George Keegan. What is there in Soviet Science and Research today that
will impact upon our lives?
In the past, you know for instance, the immense field of economic
intelligence. Economic intelligence in the old days used to be a by-
product of the study of military capabilities. Yet we live in a world
in which billions of petrodollars and Eurodollars are drifting around
the world and may be used in a hundred different ways that may impact
on the life of a worker in Omaha. We need to know about them. In
this time, we see what happens. Less than one penny out of every dol-
lar spent by the United States government goes for intelligence.
Intelligence has been on the downgrade in personnel and in expenditures
and in manpower since 1969. Something like 40 percent. And this in a
time of increasing threat. The threat to United States' survival
is far greater today than it was in 1969. Yet we have 40 percent less
people trying to find out the nature of that threat.
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Not since Valley Forge has anybody had the ability to deal us
not just a crippling, but even a mortal blow.'
Those forces exist today. I'm not telling you that I know they're
going to use them. But those forces do exist.
The two ocean cushion we had is gone. The time lapse that we've
always had, the friendly powers behind whose defenses we were able to
train and organize and prepare and get ready are no longer there.
There's very little between us and the Soviet Union.
We have bolstered the Europeans during these times. To make
an effort to convince them that the situation is not hopeless. If they
see this lack of resolution among us, and they see this lack of a
perception of threat among us, how long can they be expected to make
what would seem to them puny efforts against the mighty Soviet Union?
There is the economic threat. We have seen what this can do in
the oil boycott. The oil boycott is not the only area in which this
can be operated. We could see it again.
As I said at the beginning, intelligence is knowledge. And
knowledge is power. This is an area in which we need power to a
degree that we have not needed it before. Time and space made that
knowledge less important than it is today.
The attack on intelligence continues. In the last couple of
days, it has sort of received a renewed breath. And yet if you take the
record of - and I don't want to be overly defensive - 76,000 people
have passed through the CIA in the last 27 years. If you took any
community of 76,000 people and subjected it to the kind of scrutiny
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that we have been subjected to, I would submit that we would come
out not badly.
We find opposition to all forms of keeping our secrets, although
we seem to see a little change in the tide.
We're not asking for anything really exceptional. All we'd like
is to be on the same footing as the Bureau of the Census, or the
Department of Agriculture, or the Internal Revenue Service. If you
publish certain data from the Bureau of the Census or the Internal
Revenue Service, you'll go to jail. If you publish in advance a crop
forecast for the Department of Agriculture, you'll go to jail. We're
not asking for any really special privilege. We are asking simply
to give us some weapons to defend the eyes and ears of the United
States.
I always say that the real issue before the American people is
not the imagined or real transgressions - and I can't tell you we
haven't had some kooks, that we haven't had some zealots, that we
haven't had some people who've exercised poor judgment. You couldn't
have 76,000 different people without such a thing. But again, I say
people tend to forget the strength of the commitment under which these
people were operating. As a matter of fact, the last CIA investigation
we had was the Doolittle Commission. And the Doolittle Commisssion
came up to the conclusion that the United States was facing a ruthless
enemy determined to use every means in its power to destroy us and that
we must match their dedication with ours and their ruthlessness with
ours.
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And here we are in hindsight attempting to judge things that
were done 25 years ago against the morality of today.
Well, we had a group of young Congressmen out to the Agency,
and the subject of assassination came up. And vomeone said, "Well,
you know, this is a question of the perception of time. If anybody
could have killed Adolf Hitler in '43 or '44, he would have probably
been the first joint recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor
and the Victoria Cross."
One of these young Congressmen said, "Yes, but if you could
have gotten him in '35 or '36, think how many lives you would have
saved."
And I said, "Congressman, we were at peace with Germany in
'35 and '36. Do I understand you're advocating assassination in
peacetime?"
He said, "Oh, no. That was different."
Well, what was different about it? The only thing that was
different is we know what the result was. All this agitation about
Castro. Those who were in my generation remember that every day on
the television visible in Florida, Castro was shooting people in the
National Stadium in Havana. And I mean to be perfectly realistic,
the United States Government authorized the Bay of Pigs expedition.
Now we surely expected some people to get killed in that. It was
therefore the policy of the United States Government not to shrink
from this kind of action against Castro. As a matter of fact, we
didn't carry it through, and we see the result today. There are
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,10,000 Cubans in Angola. They're going to win. They're going to
come home filled with victory. They're going to start looking
around. Who's going to be next? Oil-rich Venezuela? The coming
oil-rich Mexico? Nothing succeeds like success: Churchill once
said that you cannot slake the appetite of dictators by feeding
them small countries to eat. Their appetite grows while they
eat. And from success to success their appetite will grow. The
German Armed Forces had great misgivings about the operation in
Norway. They had great misgivings about the attack of the West.
But Hitler was right each time. Then when he told them to do the
other operations, the experience had been that the Fuhrer had been
right against everybody's advice. And he could point to each success
that he'd had in the past as a sign for more boldness in the future.
As I say, in my opinion the Soviets have already had four
green lights. I just wonder where the next is going to be. And what
will happen is that slice by slice the salami of U.S. credibility will be
eroded. And as I said earlier, the greatest factor to keeping peace
is the credibility of a nation. And we have got to find some way
to bring home to our people just what we are faced with. We've got
to try to find some way to bring about a consensus of what we must do
about it.
And I trust the American people. We don't move like other
countries in great majestic curves. I was recalling at dinner, that
I was a Corporal in the U.S. Army in the Summer oE 1941 when France
had fallen. All Western Europe was occupied. And the German advance
towards Moscow was continuing at 30 miles a day. And the United States
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Congress approved the extension of military service by a majority of
one vote. You think that didn't embolden Germany and Japan?
These are the problems we face. However, I am not a pessimist
in spite of all I have told you. I am not a pessimist because if you
look at the whole long history of mankind - at the 6,000 years of
which we have record, we find that many tyrants in the course of those
6,000 years have been temporarily able to stem the flow of human history
towards greater freedom and dignity for the individual. And if we look
at history, we find that no tyrant has been able to do that permanently.
And I doubt very much whether modern communism, which is after
all nothing but a medieval tyranny with new clothes, will be able to
do that either.
The task is how we do it, and how we go about it.
I don't say America is sleeping. But it's dozing. Upon all
of us who are in intelligence today is incumbent the task of trying to
bring home these unpleasant realities.
We don't quite live in the ancient days when the bearer of
bad tidings got his tongue cut out or was executed. But the treat-
ment we see here meted out to the intelligence community today is
not terribly unlike this. People don't like intelligence. They
don't like intelligence giving them the facts.
Perhaps the greatest threat in America. This is the first time
since the Revolution that we are really faced with a global power.
That is a power that is growing all over the place.
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In our schools, students are taught various things. The Soviet
students today are learning what they learned twenty years ago.
Theirs is a mission, and theirs is the fatherland of socialism.
We live in a time when we are having these inquiries, and
the Soviet Union is issuing a special stamp to commemorate the 50th
anniversary of the KGB.
We've got to find our resolution. We've got to find our deci-
sion. We've got to reassure our friends that they are on the winning
side.
Their society has some difficulties in it, too. But they have
a sense of purpose. And if I were asked, what is the greatest problem
in America today - it is a weakness in an area in which we have been
traditionally strong. What made America great was our ability to work
together for a common purpose.
We've got to find that ability again because everything that
makes life worth living is at stake.
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