INTELLIGENCE AND THE PRESS ADDRESS TO THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ANNUAL MEETING BY WILLIAM E. COLBY ON MONDAY, 7 APRIL 1975

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00901R000500030011-1
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 11
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 28, 2000
• Sequence Number: 11
• Publication Date: April 7, 1975
• Content Type: SPEECH

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Office of the Assistant
to the Director
(703) 351-7676
(703) 687-6931 (night)
EDT, Monday, April 7, 197"1
Address to the
Associated Press Annual Meeting
by
William E. Colby
on
Monday, 7 April 1975
Fellow Publishers:
I presume to address you in this way to bring out a
point which is not adequately perceived these days: that
intelligence has changed from its old image to become a
modern enterprise with many of the attributes of journalism.
We collect much information in the same way you and your
reporters do from open sources, such as the foreign press
and radio, and those foreigners and Americans willing to
talk to official American reporters, such as our Embassy
officers, Defense Attaches, and CIA's clearly identified
inquiring reporters here in the U. S.
Our collection process involves a lot more than these
efforts, of course, but it is still the process of assembling
individual bits of information from a variety of sources,
cross-checking them, and coming up with reasoned assessments
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and conclusions about them. I sometimes say, and not
entirely in jest, that our publications have the largest
staff, the smallest circulation, and the lousiest adver-
tising of any journalistic enterprise.
One of our problems, of course, is an erroneous
identification of current intelligence practices with
old-fashioned spy stories. Just as the image of "The
Front Page" hardly fits the modern investigating reporter,
so the old spy story hardly reflects the enormous contri-
bution technology makes to modern intelligence. Some of
this technology has pressed the state of the art, as in
the U-2 and certain other activities of which you may
have become aware. In many of these, advances had to
be made in secret in order to avoid alerting foreign
subjects of these capabilities so that they not frustrate
them. This contribution to modern information, in a
variety of fields from photography to electronics, has
revolutionized intelligence, and we now can run a pictorial
supplement and a technical journal about foreign weapons
systems and military forces which we could only generally
sketch out from indirect sources in years past.
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Just as in your profession, we are faced with the
problems of success -- how to organize and articulate
the key judgments and conclusions hidden in this explosion
of raw information. For this I am pleased to say that
we have adopted another attribute of the profession of
journalism -- the editorial board. In the early days of
World War II, our country faced the problem of an instant
need for knowledge of such far-off places as South Pacific
islands or the hump between India and China. We assembled
from American academic circles, business circles, and
journalism, staffs of experts of these areas. They then
became the repository of all information on these subjects
available to the United States Government.
This analysis staff has since developed into another
unique American contribution to intelligence. At our
Headquarters today, we probably have more doctors, masters,
and other advanced students of complex disciplines from
agricultural economics to nuclear physics than can be
found in most large American universities. It is their
task to separate the true from the false, the full from
the half story, and the warped from the straightforward
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report. They produce our publications, and their reputa-
tion for independence, objectivity and integrity is as
precious to them as the reputation of your profession
is to you.
Am I sliding over the old-fashioned concept of
clandestine intelligence or our role in political and
paramilitary work abroad? No. These are a part of
our intelligence function, and they do make a unique
and important contribution to the safety of our country.
Some things cannot be learned by the inquiring reporter
or Q ---the spy in the sky. Sources within a closed and
authoritarian foreign society can let us know its secrets
in these days of mutual vulnerability to nuclear warfare.
When defense systems take years to build, we need to know
of the hostile weapon while it is being planned, as well
as when it is cocked. We must understand the personal and
political dynamics which can produce threats from such
societies. And, there are occasions in which some quiet
assistance to friends of America in some foreign country
can help them withstand hostile internal pressures before
they become international pressures against the United States.
But while I do not wish to slide over these activities,
I do wish to point out the comparatively small proportion they
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play in our intelligence function and activities these
days. The most important part of our mission is in the
intellectual process of collecting, analyzing and pre-
senting intelligence to assist in the important decisions
our government makes about the safety of our country and
the welfare of our people.
In the very function of intelligence, great changes
have occurred. Intelligence no longer consists only of
stealing the military secret so that the General may win
a battle. Today it provides the basis for negotiations
to remove or defuse military and economic threats to our
country by mutual agreement rather than armed force. It
thus fulfills a positive peace-keeping as well as its
old defensive security role.
While I think our country has developed the best
intelligence service in the world, I must warn you that it
is in danger today. Intelligence by its very nature needs
some secrets if its agents are to survive, if its officers
are to do their work, and if its technology is not to be
turned off by a flick of a switch. We in the American
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intelligence profession are proud of our open society;
this is why we devote our lives to its service. But we
also believe that this open society must be protected
and that intelligence, and even secret intelligence,
must play a part in that protection in the world in which
we live.
There are secrets in American society. Grand jury
proceedings are secret, Congressional committees meet in
secret executive sessions, we have secret military capa-
bilities, and our journalistic profession insists on its
right to protect its sources. But for some reason,
secrets of intelligence arouse such public fascination
that the letters "CIA" can move a story only tangentially
referring to CIA from the bottom of page 7 to the top of
page 1.
Mr. Charles Seib, the "ombudsman" of The Washington
Post, recently wrote a critique of what he called the
"sensational lead." This referred to the wire service
practice in days gone by, and he stressed that they have
gone by for the wire services today (both in the splendid
Associated Press and Brand X) wherein a story would be
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twisted and turned in order to get a sensational lead to
catch immediate reader attention.
The CIA today, I fear, fits this category of the
sensational lead. If CIA were in politics, we could
perhaps take solace from the politician's old story
about not caring what they said about him so long as
they spelled his name right. But our intelligence
agency today and its service to our country are being
jeopardized by its status as the nation's number one
sensational lead.
Our agents abroad are questioning our ability to
keep their work for us secret, work they do with us
because they believe in democracy too, but work which
can jeopardize their lives if revealed. Many Americans
who have helped their country through its intelligence
service are concerned that they will be swept into the
climate of sensationalism and their businesses abroad
destroyed by a revelation of their patriotic assistance
to CIA. And a number of cooperative foreign officials
have expressed great concern to me as to whether they
can safely continue to pass their sensitive information
to us in this climate of exposure. We are already seeing
some of these sources withdraw from their relationship
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with us or constrict the information they provide us.
The foreign military attache in Washington can
purchase at our newsstands information which our
intelligence service must run the risk of life and death
and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to obtain about
his country. I do not object to this. In fact, it is one
of the strengths of this great American society. But I do
believe that with the benefits of our open society comes
an equal responsibility to protect it by not revealing
its attempts to protect itself through intelligence
operations. That responsibility rests not only with the
nation's intelligence service, it rests with every
American. It rests especially with you, with your enormous
power and freedom under our Constitution to choose which
subjects to call to public attention and which ones to
ignore.
.?l1J-~'u--rk 2.4.E
I am pleased to say that in some r-e -dealings
with the journalistic profession, I found much evidence
of this sense of responsibility, even from some of my
most severe critics. This sense of responsibility was
double-bladed. Part was a receptiveness to the valid
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reasons why I believed certain information should be
withheld from publication and consequent inevitable
exposure to foreigners. Part of that sense of responsi-
bility also involved a clear understanding that in our
society the decision on this question was the journalist's,
not mine, unless I could meet the Supreme Court's test of
"direct, immediate and irreparable damage to our nation or
its people."
Thus, on this question of intelligence and the press,
I believe we Americans can quite easily agree on the
general principles. It becomes difficult, however, if
the story gets ahead of the capability to be responsible.
For example, sometimes the journalist assumes that the
story can do no harm, when, in reality, there are
unrevealed facts about it which would change the jour-
nalist's mind. Some of our more critical journalists
have a practice of calling the subject of a story to
afford a chance of a denial or other comment. This does
allow the presentation of good reasons to write the story
so as to protect important secrets or even, in exceptional
cases, to withhold it.
I do not have to make this appeal to this audience,
as I know that your procedures would be the responsible
ones. I do suggest, however, that you consider carefully
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whether CIA really should be the sensational lead in
any story in which it is mentioned even incidentally, and
thereby fan the fires of excitement about CIA and inevitably
obscure the real nature of modern intelligence and its
contribution to our country.
I do not ask that "bad secrets" be suppressed. In
fact, I have exposed some of our missteps of the past. I
also believe that "non-secrets" should be exposed. A
"non-secret" I define as a known fact about intelligence
which in the old tradition would have been kept secret,
but which in our open society should no longer be withheld.
The public inquiry and debate we are conducting as to the
proper authority, limits, and supervision of our national
intelligence effort falls into this category. But I do
make a plea that "good secrets" be respected, in the
interests not of intelligence but of our nation. Our
people must not only be protected in today's world, they
should benefit in many other ways from what modern
intelligence can provide. I do not ask that the healthy
adversary relationship between the press and government (and our
government's intelligence structure) should be abandoned.
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I only ask that we Americans protect our nation's sources
in the same way the journalist protects his.
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