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• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00901R000700060105-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 30
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 17, 2005
• Sequence Number: 105
• Publication Date: June 18, 1978
• Content Type: TRANS

RDIII(1 T\/ PORTS into
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PROGRAM F i r i n g Line
STATION WETA-TV
PBS Network
DATE June 18P 1978 5:00 PM CITY Washington, D.C.
WILLIAM BUCKLEY: The crisis of intelligence is on the
minds of most intelligent people. It is a crisis that confronts
democratic dogma and existential problems. The executive and con-
gressional committees that have looked into the matter, notably
one headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, by Senator Church
and by Congressman Pike, specialized in advertising the excesses
of the essential intelligence agencies. Sweeping reorganizations
followed, the effects of which will be discussed, among other
things, during this hour with General Vernon A. Walters.
General Walters, who served as Deputy Director of CIA
for four years, has just published a book called "Silent Missions."
Its instructive value apart, it is an engrossing account of high
doings and misdoings in the international world of diplomacy and
intrigue, in which General Walters played sometimes the part of
an assistant architect, sometimes the part of a technician.
It is easier to enumerate those international conferences
and midnight sessions at which he was not present than those at
which he. was. His principal merchandisable commodity has been an
uncanny memory and proficiency in language. He speaks fluently
French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portugese, Dutch, Greek, and
Russian. He has a few difficulties with Japanese, but he can man-
age.
Accordingly, before he went to the CIA, and indeed even
while he was at the CIA, he served as confidential translator in
the early years for Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, Kennedy,
then Nixon, for Henry Kissinger, Averell Harriman, in Paris, China,
South America, Italy, wherever the action was.
General Walters, interestingly, didn't attend college,
Material supplied by Radio TV Reports, Inc. may be used for file and reference purposes only. It may not be reproduced, sold or publicly demonstrated or exhibited.
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though he went to preparatory schools in France and England. He
enrolled in the Army as a private. And although untouched by the
Watergate scandal, he was the principal witness to the conversation
which subsequently proved to be the smoking pistol that forced
Richard Nixon out of office.
General Walters retired at the age of 59, when George
Bush became the Director of CIA. He went to work on his extra-
ordinary memoirs.
Our interrogator, whom I will introduce in due course,
is Mr. Meyer here in Miami.
I should like to begin by asking General Walters a ques-
tion he might regard as naive. How is it that for 150 years the
United States got on without an official intelligence system, let
alone a counterintelligence system, but now it is claimed that we
require one?
GENERAL VERNON WALTERS: I've never heard of your asking
a naive question in my life.
I think the answer to your question is because God, in
the old saying, takes care of fools, drunkards, and the United
States of America. Also, geography saved us in the early days.
BUCKLEY: Well, in your book you cite the case of Pearl
Harbor, and you say that after the shock of Pearl Harbor we had a
chance to recoil and come back again; but in a future Pearl Harbor
we would not have that opportunity.
Is this another reason, based on technology, for an intel-
ligence system?
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, I think the United States -- and
this isn't popular to say right now -- is more threatened than it
has been at any time in its history. We have never, since the
Revolution, faced a global power before. Germany, at the height
of its power, was a basically European regional power. Japan, at
the height of its power, was basically a Western Pacific/Southeast
Asian power. Now, for the first time, we face one global power,
and we have another one coming up.
Recent events in Angola and in the Horn of Africa have
shown that the Soviet Union is not only capable, but willing to
project its power thousands of miles from the boundaries of the
Soviet Union.
BUCKLEY: Well, General, since most of us agree that
there is no other explanation for.Soviet activity than its ravenous
appetite for power and imperialism, we can, I think, take that as
a given.
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But specifically on the matter of intelligence, and given
the activities that you described in your book, is it a necessary
and predictable weakness in democracy that it cannot operate a
sufficiently flexible intelligence system because one that is
sufficiently flexible cannot stand up under rigorous public scru-
tiny?
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, no other democracy attempts to
run its intelligence service under public scrutiny, whether it be
socialist Sweden or neutralist Switzerland.
BUCKLEY: From which you deduce what?
GENERAL WALTERS: From which I deduce...
BUCKLEY: A specific American pathology?
GENERAL WALTERS. I deduce a specific American pathology,
based largely on false history.
BUCKLEY: How would you describe it?
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, the average -- we have a great
ambivalence towards intelligence. The average American thinks it's
something that isn't very clean, it isn't very American, and the
Founding Fathers wouldn't like it.
Well, I have news for them. George Washington was one
of the most prolific readers of other people's mail. Benjamin
Franklin, who was Assistant Postmaster of British North America
before the Revolution, when we were all loyal subjects of George lll.
He busily was opening all the British mail. They caught him. They
sent him to London to stand trial before the Privy Council. They
found him guilty. Before they could sentence him, he skipped off
to France to conduct the covert operation that was to bring France
into the war on the side of the Revolution. Now, this was a remark-
able achievement, seeing that Anthony Eden's great-great-great-grand-
father had fully penetrated Benjamin Franklin's office. His valet
was a British agent, his secretary was a British agent, and we have
some doubts about one of the three commissioners.
BUCKLEY: But a dozen generations after Franklin, the
Secretary of State of the United States said, "Gentlemen don't read
other people's mail."
GENERAL WALTERS: That was Mr. Stimson in 1932.
BUCKLEY: That's right.
GENERAL WALTERS: Mr. Stimson in 1941 was so busy reading
other people's mail, he didn't have much time to do anything else.
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BUCKLEY: Your pointn then, is that the exigencies of the
international situation are going to dictate the relevant ethic?
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, I think there's a first respon-
sibility of every government, and that is to insure the survival
of its people. And we are operating now under conditions threa-
tening national survival that have no precedent in human history.
It has never in the past been possible to destroy the sovereignty
of a nation in a matter of hours. That is possible now.
You spoke of Pearl Harbor. We survived a conventional
Pearl Harbor. Who could survive a nuclear Pearl Harbor?
The greatest defense against a nuclear Pearl Harbor is
the existence of an effective American intelligence community that
will make it quite clear to anybody that preparations for such an
operation will be picked up.
BUCKLEY: Well, the trouble with that statement is that
everybody agrees with it. But then when you go on to ask certain
questions that you consider to be derivative, you will find con-
siderable disagreement.
Let's take a hard one, shall we? -- assassination.
GENERAL WALTERS: Right.
BUCKLEY: Now, both of us know that it has been widely
charged recently -- for instance, by Mr. Stockwell -- that the CIA
assassinated Lumumba, assassinated Diem, tried to assassinate
Castro, and so on and so forth. I guess we both know that, in
fact, the CIA didn't do...
GENERAL WALTERS: That's right.
BUCKLEY: ...at least the first two of those things.
GENERAL WALTERS: If they had, Senator Church would have
brought it out quite plainly.
BUCKLEY: For sure.
Now let me ask you this: If the first responsibility of
a country is to protect itself, then can't you, ex hypothesi, come
up with a situation in which an assassination would be sanctioned
by the Walters Rule? And yet it's something we wouldn't want to
discuss, quite, would we?
GENERAL WALTERS: Let me just amplify a little bit on
that. My own position on assassination is I'm against it, for
three reasons: It's against the law of God. It's against the
law of man. And it generally doesn't work. Now...
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.BUCKLEY: Which shows that God was prudent?
GENERAL WALTERS: Very. We know that. He only created
one human species.
The other one, I think, is, if you go into something --
for instance, like the Bay of Pigs -- two U.S. governments, Eisen-
hower's and Kennedy's, sanctioned that. Now, I'm not in favor of
assassination; I want to make this clear. But they knew that a
lot of young men were going to be killed if that operation went
forward. Why do you spread an umbrella over one person and not
over the others?
Having said that, I say I don't believe assassination
works. I think if you do it you get another fanatic who is even
worse.
In the matter of survival, you have to weigh -- I once
had a young officer in a friendly country...
you?
BUCKLEY: You're well into a metaphysical paradox, aren't
BUCKLEY: You keep saying, "You understand, I don't believe
this." However, the intellectual arguments favor it.
GENERAL WALTERS: But I have religious feelings that oppose
BUCKLEY: Okay.
GENERAL WALTERS: Rationally, I would agree.
BUCKLEY: Let's bring this out, then. Assuming that you
didn't have -- that you didn't feel the religious sanction and you
were guided only by juridical arguments, let me ask you this ques-
tion: Suppose Idi Amin were reported by Israeli intelligence as
on his way with an atomic bomb that he had managed to filch from
some arsenal to bomb Tel Aviv.
problem.
Now, we acknowledge the right of self-defense, do we not?
GENERAL WALTERS: Yes.
BUCKLEY: Suppose that...
GENERAL WALTERS: It's the limits of it that are the
BUCKLEY: Correct. And to what extent can you pre-empt
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a strike of that sort via assassination? Or must you go through
a certain juridical ritual -- for instance, a declaration of war --
in order to justify it?
GENERAL WALTERS: I would say the latter is correct,
except that declaring war has gone out of fashion since 1945.
We've had large numbers of conflicts, nearly all of them unde-
clared. You know, you've heard a lot of people say, "Oh, you
could do that in wartime, but you couldn't do it during the Vietnam
War." But what was the Vietnam War? It wasn't a declared war, but
the Congress was voting the money to keep the war going, and thereby
sanctioned it.
BUCKLEY: Well, does it follow that because you have a
de facto war, you inherit the de jure rights that a normal war
confers on you? For instance, we certainly tried very hard to
assassinate individual Japanese leaders, and in some cases...
GENERAL WALTERS: We did.
BUCKLEY: ...we succeeded.
GENERAL WALTERS: Yamamoto.
BUCKLEY: Yamamoto, yeah. We succeeded.
Now, would we have been justified in searching out Ho
Chi Minh during the Vietnam War and assassinating him?
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, whether you say "assassinating
him" or whether you say "killing the commander-in-chief of the
enemy army." I would say we certainly had the right to do the
latter.
BUCKLEY: And you don't call it assassination because
the juridical protections of a de factor war give you the right
moral cover?
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, the whole problem is that all
these questions of division between assassination and killing an
enemy depends on who writes the history books. And the victors
usually write the history books.
BUCKLEY: History is the polemics of the victor, as
somebody said.
Now, the reason Sweden and France and Great Britain do
not permit public probing of their intelligence systems is what,
that they are more cautious races of people, or that they have a
longer tradition that suggests to them that which ought to be kept
secret and that which ought not to be kept secret? Or is it some-
thing about the distinct moralism of the American character that
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insists on probing those chemistries?
GENERAL WALTERS: There's a mixture of all.
First of all, the British had an intelligence service
250 years before we became an independent country.
BUCKLEY: On which we heavily relied during the last...
GENERAL WALTERS: On which we heavily relied and on which
we still hope is quite successful in its area.
Let me just tell you a story. Recently a high-ranking
official of the CIA went abroad, and he was talking to the head of
a large intelligence service of a Western European country that is
very democratic, and he explained to hire how that the CIA was going
to be kept in perfect order and within the Constitution and the
laws and everything else. And he asked this European chief of
service what he thought of it.
And he said, "Well, I don't understand. To me, the only
justification for having a clandestine service is to be able to do
illegal things."
BUCKLEY: Well, everybody grants that they are illegal by
the laws of the country in which you operate, but they're not sup-
posed to be illegal by the laws of the patron country.
GENERAL WALTERS: But no one has attenipted, l i ke we have,
to legislate what an intelligence service can do and can not do.
BUCKLEY: Now, are you arguing that we ought not to have
such legislation?
GENERAL WALTERS: I am arguing that we should not. I
believe that intelligence is a part of the Executive Branch. The
President, whoever he is, is the depository of the conscience of
the American people. He is the ultimate one charged with the sur-
vival of the United States. And this is not a...
BUCKLEY: Are you making a constitutional -- are you
making a constitutional point, or are you simply saying that it
is inherent in the responsibilities of -- that Article II confers
on the President?
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, it has been inherent until Water-
gate. No one challenged the President's right in this area. If
the President said bug someone, they were bugged. This was the
case up to the Watergate.
At this point, we passed from an ascendant presidency to
an ascendant Congress. Now, at some point we're going to have to
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decide whether the intelligence services, which are a part of the
Executive Branch, are going to be under the Congress or under the
Executive.
BUCKLEY: And preferably before Pearl Harbor. We will
settle that question before the next...
GENERAL WALTERS: The ascendancy of the presidency began
with Franklin Roosevelt.
GENERAL WALTERS: We're going to have to decide whether
we're going to go to a parliamentary democracy or maintain our ori-
ginal constitutional presidential democracy.
BUCKLEY: Well, the parliamentary democracy of Great
Britain proceeds; however, it is unencumbered by the problems that
we're here discussing. Right?
GENERAL WALTERS: Yes. For instance, in Great Britain,
If you publish the name of the head of the British intelligence
service, you go to jail.
BUCKLEY: Do you approve of that?
GENERAL WALTERS: That's their decision there. I think
that is excessive, myself, in the present day, because they can
reproduce it from a foreign newspaper which says it, so people know
who it is.
However, basically, when they have something wrong with
their intelligence service, they form a Royal Commission. This is
what the Canadians and the Australians or anyone else do. They
investigate it. These are a group of responsible citizens who are
not running for office and not advancing their own presidential
candidacies. They come up with a report, they present it to the
chief of state or the chief of government, they show it to senior
leaders of the Congress, not everybody.
You know, John Marshall -- John Jay -- I'm sorry -- who
was the first Chief Justice, ran the spies of the Revolution. It
was called the Committee of Secret Correspondence. And on one
occasion he was asked to lay before the Congress the names of the
people employed by him, the sums paid to them, and the purposes
for which paid. And he replied, "Experience has shown that the
Congress is composed of too many people to keep this kind of secret.
Such revelations have generally been fatal to many of the people in-
volved."
BUCKLEY: Should William Colby have replied in like manner
to the congressional committees before which he testified?
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GENERAL WALTERS: Well, it's a difficult one. I would
say, theoretically, yes. Whether that was possible in the momentum
of the anti-intelligence thrust at that time, whether it would have
served a useful purpose or not, I don't know.
. I have enormous admiration for Bill Colby, but I am some-
what harder on this subject than he is. I am somewhat less peni-
tential, shall we say.
BUCKLEY: Well, you deal with that very eloquently in your
Edward Heath said recently, "Leakage in the U.S. presents
a terrible problem for the Free World. If I were Prime Minister now,
I don't know how I could possibly recommend carrying on exchanges
of intelligence information with the United States."
Now, is this something -- is this attitude of Heath's
reflected in the current relations between American and British
intelligence?
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, all I can tell you is that for
4 1/2 years one of my principal jobs was reassuring friends. 1
used to go about once a month abroad to do that.
BUCKLEY: How can you reassure them with any confidence?
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, there are certain ways that you
can do this. You can tell them, "We may give up our secrets, but
we won't give up yours." And to my knowledge we have given up very
few of other people's secrets.
You can reassure them that at some point the United States
will begin to behave like an adult nation, and not like a bunch of
children, again.
And finally, we do have certain technical intelligence
that they have nowhere else to go for, which...
BUCKLEY: Gives you a quid pro quo to argue from.
GENERAL WALTERS: Gives you a good quid pro quo from
argue from.
BUCKLEY: Now, General, you deal in your book with Water-
gate, but I'd rather hear you make this point than for me to recapi-
tulate it.
It is, I think, correct to say that when, on orders from
the President of the United States, you and your agency were in-
structed not to pursue an investigation into Watergate...
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GENERAL WALTERS: I n Mexico only.
BUCKLEY: In Mexico only. A great many Americans got
the impression that the CIA had become a political pawn of the
United States. You are very indignant on this point in your book,
and I wish you'd tell us why.
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, I tried to mask any indignation
I might feel.
BUCKLEY: Legitimate indignation, I think.
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, I think the reason is this: I'd
been in that job for six weeks when Haldeman called me in. And I
had never heard the word Mexico used -- remember, this is a week
after the event. And he says, "Stop the investigation in Mexico.
It may uncover some secret CIA activities there." Well, I mean
neither Helms nor I know all of the CIA activities.
I had just come from three years of secret negotiations
in Paris with the Chinese and the North Vietnamese. I figured they
had something like this going with Castro in Mexico City. This is
on a Friday afternoon. And, also, it may seem naive in retrospect,
but when the President's chief of staff calls you into his office
and tells you to do something, you have no reason to believe he's
asking you to do anything illegal. And again, in this area, no
one had challenged the President's power until this time. All you
have to do is read some of the things that were going on in the
field of intelligence.
BUCKLEY: I don't think anybody challenges his power even
now. The question is, how was he motivated?
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, I don't know what his motivations...
BUCKLEY: Well, we all know how he was motivated now, be-
cause of the June 23rd tape.
GENERAL WALTERS: But Haldeman did not tell me specifi-
cally, "The President wants you to do it." He did not tell me that
way.
So I went and did it. That was on the Friday afternoon.
-I came back to the CIA and I was still a little bothered at this.
Now, if he'd asked me to stop the whole investigation, I would have
been more concerned. But just Mexico -- since Mexico hadn't sur-
faced in any way in connection with Watergate at that time, this
seemed a rather limited area to me.
BUCKLEY:. And then John Dean called you.
GENERAL WALTERS: Then -- no. Before that, I went back to
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CIA and I called in our Western Hemisphere people and I said, "I
want you to tell me whether there's anything going on in Mexico
City, whether you sense anything going on in Mexico City."
What I mean is, specifically, when I was doing this in
Paris, I was giving the traffic to the White House, through the
CIA communications, but I was coding it so they couldn't read it.
I said, "Is there any traffic coming out of Mexico City
we're not reading?" And I asked Colby, and he so says in his book.
He checked on the Friday, and they either told me Friday or Satur-
day that there was no CIA interest.
Monday morning, John Dean calls me and says, "What's the
CIA connection?"
BUCKLEY: Monday morning being the Monday after June 23rd.
GENERAL WALTERS: The Monday after June 23rd; June 25th,
said, "There's none. I've checked into it. There's
Now, I was told that he was the coordinator, he was in
touch with Gray, with Haldeman, with Ehrlichman, and everybody.
Rather naively, in retrospect, I believed that he would tell Gray.
He called me the second day and asked me to pay bail for these
people. And I told him, no, I wouldn't do it; and the third day
I told him, no, I wouldn't do it.
At the end of the week I received a call from Pat Gray,
the Director of the FBI, the Acting Director, which rather sur-
prised me, since I had naively thought that Dean would have told
him on the Monday, which would have meant that the thing would
have been held up a total of 72 hours.
I might point out that if you look over this -- and even
the Washington Post, which is not suspect of special partiality
toward the CIA, said the CIA was the only government organization
which did not do what It was asked.
BUCKLEY: And that is testimony to what, a kind of insti-
tutional integrity that shows that it is not really subservient to
the President for venal purposes?
GENERAL WALTERS: No. In my opinion, I did not address
the morality of it. I knew it wouldn't work.
BUCKLEY: Well, is this something you're willing to say
about the CIA that you would not be willing to say about the FBI,
as witness the use of the FBI by Johnson and Kennedy for getting
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tapes on Martin Luther King, and that kind of thing?
GENERAL WALTERS: I think there's no way you can stop
a certain amount of this. I think you've got to weight it against
the total impact. When you're dealing with very large numbers of
people -- for instance, you take the CIA. Eighty thousand people
have passed through the CIA, in totol, since it began. I can't
tell you that among them there weren't some kooks and nuts and
people with bad judgment and zealots.
BUCKLEY: Well, Agee, for instance.
GENERAL WALTERS: Yeah. Well, defectors.
BUCKLEY: Yeah. Un-huh.
GENERAL WALTERS: I can't tell you there weren't, but I
can tell you that the number compares favorably with the Department
of Agriculture or Health, Education and Welfare.
BUCKLEY: Well, on the other hand, it jolly well should,
given the character of its responsibility. Right?
GENERAL WALTERS: Right.
BUCKLEY: Now, President Carter has an elaborate reorgan-
ization of intelligence. Do you feel free to give your opinion as
to whether there is sufficient latitude for an effective CIA under
the existing program?
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, somewhere deep in the American
national character is buried a profound but mistaken belief that
reorganization is an effective substitute for intelligent and
forceful action. Unfortunately, it is not.
In 35 years in intelligence, I have watched an endless
series of reorganizations. A good organization with bad people
will produce deplorably. A bad organization with good people will
produce very well. People are what count.
BUCKLEY: So, what you would look at is less the tables
of organization than who's actually running the thing.
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, I think that again we get to this
American ambivalence. I think it is very difficult to legislate how
a secret intelligence agency is going to operate.
First of all, the consensus changes. If we were to judge
Thomas Jefferson by our morality of today -- he owned slaves. So
did George Washington. Retroactive morality is a very difficult
thing to cope with.
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BUCKLEY: Well, I agree. But the figures are there that
show us, for instance, that CIA personnel engaged in covert activity
diminished from 8500 to 4500. Now, unless we can assume that this
was -- this is gesture towards efficiency, we've got to assume that
we are undertaking fewer covert responsibilities. This is a position
that President Nixon has recently complained about, and Henry Kissin-
ger.
GENERAL WALTERS: I agree.
BUCKLEY: Is that correct?
GENERAL WALTERS: That is correct.
BUCKLEY: Well, what's going to change that?
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, when the American people gradu-
ally realize that they must have something between a diplomatic
protest and landing U.S. forces in the way of ability to quietly
help our friends while our enemies are being massively assisted
on the outside. There are some signs of awakening now. We have
been behaving very virtuously in Africa, and we've been losing
steadily.
BUCKLEY: Well, is one of the difficulties of the CIA
that it is not permitted, by the nature of its functions, to elabor-
ate on its successes?
BUCKLEY: Now, Melvin Laird, for instance, published a
few months ago an account of some of the operations of the CIA
concerning which most people were unfamiliar. It saved Golda Meir's
life in New York City, for instance.
Now, there are some of those in your book.
BUCKLEY: That was a technical violation, wasn't it?
GENERAL WALTERS: Yes.
BUCKLEY: How is that elision coped with?
GENERAL WALTERS: It isn't.
BUCKLEY: In other words, no schematic accommodates that
problem.
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, the attempt to divide this on an
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absolute line is just not practical.
BUCKLEY: Including assassination?
GENERAL WALTERS: No. I mean between domestic and foreign.
What is domestic and what is foreign intelligence? This attempt to
say, "Well, as long as they're on the airplane, they're the CIA's.
When they get off at the airport, they become the FBI's." I mean
this is the ideal to do it, and everything else. But when you try
to put down an absolute law and say you can't reach one inch beyond
the customs enclosure, it's not practical.
BUCKLEY: But there are categorical prohibitions, under
the new.arrangements. One of them is covert activities in the United
States. Another is attempts to assassinate. A third is contracts
with academic or other non-government institutions without disclosing
the nature of the contract.
Now, is an attempt at a categorical prohibition in itself
wrongheaded?
GENERAL WALTERS: Yes.
BUCKLEY: I agree with you.
GENERAL WALTERS: Let me just tell you a little story
current in Europe right now.
BUCKLEY: I wish you'd say something I disagree with.
GENERAL WALTERS: The Soviets recruit an American spy,
obviously an American because he's protected by all the constitu-
tional guarantees, whereas if you have a foreigner he might not be.
They take him to Moscow, they teach him shortwave transmission,
secret writing, invisible ink, special communications, everything
else; and they send him back to the United States, and they tell
him, "Now, you stay there, and we'll be in touch with you in a
couple of years."
In a couple of years they try to find him, and they've
lost his address. And they're very upset about this. They spent
an awful lot of money on him, and they don't know how to get hold
of him. And finally somebody says, "I have an idea. We ask the
Americans, under the Freedom of Information Act, where he is." You
don't even have to be an American to get information under the
Freedom of Information Act.
BUCKLEY: And operationally, how does that proceed?
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, then you cover yourself in the
Privacy Act, that prevents you from getting...
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BUCKLEY: And you quote a couple of instances in which
the Privacy Act was something on which you relied.
GENERAL WALTERS: Yes. I'm fascinated. When I have my
annual physical, the Army asks for my permission to derogate the
Privacy Act so they can pass the findings on to somebody. You
know, this is carrying these things to absolutely an absurd degree.
After Entebbe, someone asked me, "Could we do that?"
And I said, "No."
And they said, "Why not?"
I said, "if the Israelis had had to report that covert
operation, that paramilitary operation to seven different com-
mittees of the Knesset, composing 52% of the members of that body,
Id! Amin would have been waiting for them on the end of the runway."
Now, we've got to decide whether we want to run a highly
moralistic thing, in the light of the morality of today, or whether
we want to have an effective intelligence agency.
An old professor of ethics once said to me, "The most
immoral thing in the world is to fail to do what is necessary to
insure the survival of human freedom." Because if we fall -- it's
not like the British, who had us behind them -- there is no one
behind us. The Dark Ages close in if we go down.
BUCKLEY: Well, but, General, don't you -- you seem to
be saying two things. On the one hand you are saying that we are
really running the danger that we can't mount an Entebbe-type
operation. On the other hand you are telling me, really, that
all of these organizational constrictions, in fact, don't keep you
from doing what it is required that you do.
GENERAL WALTERS: If I said that, I'm wrong. They do
keep you from doing. And I think we are in a catastrophically
dangerous situation. As I said before, I think the United States
is in greater danger now than it was in 1939, 1941, 1917, 1898,
1848, or whenever you want. And nobody perceives this danger.
BUCKLEY: Well, is it a danger inherent in democracy,
or do you simply adduce once again the Swedish experience and the
English experience to show that you can have both?
GENERAL WALTERS: You can have both. It's a peculiar we have been led to this.
BUCKLEY: It's an American disease.
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, what you've got right now...
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BUCKLEY: It's angelism, isn't it?
GENERAL WALTERS: It's angel ism.
This is going to make me unpopular; but basically, we are
a country that is run by the media. We are accustomed to get our
information and our news and our education, in a sense, from the
various forms of the media. And whether this mediacracy has led
us to mediocrity, or mediocrity has led us to mediacracy, I don't
know; but neither of them are good.
BUCKLEY: We permit no puns on Firing Line, General.
BUCKLEY: If the media -- in your book you have a mar-
velous episode. Here's Kissinger on one of his 15 secret missions,
all of which you supervised, in Paris.
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, you can't supervise Dr. Kissinger.
BUCKLEY: I said the mission.
And he runs into Le Duc The. And Le Duc Tho is at his
arrogant worst.
GENERAL WALTERS: Oh, yes.
BUCKLEY: And he talks about how American opposition is
going to deliver Vietnam into Hanoi's hands [unintelligible]. And
you quote a little lecture that Kissinger gave, rather approvingly.
What was it?
GENERAL WALTERS: I'd rather tell the whole story.
BUCKLEY: Yeah, go ahead.
GENERAL WALTERS: We were seeing Le Due Tho. You know,
the North Vietnamese lived in most luxurious areas In Paris, in
Avenue Mozart. But they always met Mr. Kissinger in a very poor
communist suburb, in a drab little villa. And we went out there
to meet him. And as we were at the foot of the steps, Le Duc Tho
was standing at the top of the steps, and he looked down at Kis-
singer and he said, "You know, I don't know why I'm wasting my
time negotiating anything with you. I've just spent six hours
with Senator McGovern. Your opposition is going to force you to
give me what I want."
Unfortunately, he was right historically.
But that was one of Dr. Kissinger's better days. He
looked at him and he said, "Dr. Le Duc Tho, you are a citizen of
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the most totalitarian nation on the surface of this planet. You
know nothing about an opposition because you have always brutally
destroyed any opposition which showed itself in your own country.
Do not attempt to interpret that which you do not tolerate. Leave
that to those of us who tolerate an opposition."
BUCKLEY: I can see why you have your reputation of a
memory. I bet that was verbatim.
But I had rather sinister purposes in bringing this up.
GENERAL WALTERS: That's why I mentioned the name.
BUCKLEY: And my sinister purpose is that isn't it that
opposition that has caused an investigation of the Central Intel-
ligence Agency?
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, you know, you get back to the
old Latin thing of qui Bono, who benefits from this?
BUCKLEY: Oh, of course. But we're not here to say
that the media are working for the Soviet Union; they are working
for themselves.
GENERAL WALTERS: Lenin once said that the most useful
adjuncts of world communism are the useful idiots, not the agents.
BUCKLEY: Well, and this I don't doubt. And if you're
here to say, "Look, when the New York Times publishes papers
whisked away by Daniel Ellsberg, the New York Times is actually
doing something that helps the enemy," I agree with you. However,
this is not their motive.
GENERAL WALTERS: Oh, no.
BUCKLEY: Their motive is precisely what you alluded
BUCKLEY: Yeah. And people get Pulitzer Prizes for being
part of this enterprise.
But what I'm asking you Is, given the sort of spine-
tingling lecture that Kissinger gave Le Duc Tho, aren't we required
to believe that perhaps this very opposition prevents the Chief
Executive from sanctioning a CIA that requires too much power?
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GENERAL WALTERS: Well, how it can require too much
power, I'm not sure, vis-a-vis the President. You see, I had the
experience in the 4 1/2 years I was there of having four separate
Directors shot out from over me. And as long as the President
controls the appointment of the Director and can fire him, I don't
see how the CIA can acquire all this power.
BUCKLEY: Well, you have a novel by John Ehrlichman in
which he described a situation in which the President couldn't
fire the head of the CIA. Now, that hasn't happened, but stranger
things have, like the impeachment of Presidents who tried to order
the CIA around.
GENERAL WALTERS: Yes. Well, I must say, Mr. Ehrlichman
obviously has a greater imagination than I do.
BUCKLEY: Well, but your imagination is very vivid in
respect of what it is that the Soviet Union might do to us if we
are not prepared to penetrate it.
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, I'm more concerned with the Soviet
Union's ability to play chess with us. I don't believe they're
looking for a nuclear confronation in which they could lose a large
part of their infrastructure and a large part of their population,
regardless of whether they have air raid shelters or not. I think
they're much more interested in what I call the salami technique,
of taking little slices at a time so that no one will raise up
against them.
BUCKLEY: Not more than one Afghanistan per month?
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, let me tell you an interesting
story. The other day I was talking to the head of a friendly for-
eign service and I said to him, "You know, it's a little incon-
gruous. Brezhnev, after making himself a Marshal of the Soviet
Union, has now got himself given the Star of Victory, which was
the medal they gave to the victorious marshals of World War It,
and which has not been awarded since 1945."
He said, "You're wrong. You think the Cold War -- like
all the other Americans, you think the Cold War is over." He said,
"To the Soviets, turning Clausewitz around, war is the continuation
of peace by other means -- of foreign policy by other means.
"Now," he said, "from their point of view, under Brezhnev,
they have taken over -- the communists have taken over Vietnam,
Laos, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, and are in the process of taking
over the Horn of Africa. Quite frankly, he's conquered a lot more
territory that Zhukov, Koniev (?), Tarbuk (?), and Arokosovsky (?)."
Victory.
They see nothing incongruous in his getting the Star of
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BUCKLEY: Well, the -- there is no question that he
deserves anything that he gets. However, Isn't it also true that
these conquests were made not, as the conquests of his predecessors,
with Soviet -- with U.S. aid, but, ostensibly, in spite of U.S.
opposition. And this is the real story, isn't it?
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, he should get a Star of Victory
slightly larger than the others. No Soviet soldiers died conquering
these territories.
BUCKLEY: What should our Presidents get?
GENERAL WALTERS: A long year -- a long career in the
service of my country and respect for the Commanders-in-Chief pre-
vents me from answering.
BUCKLEY: I once had a professor at Yale who didn't
believe in presidential elections. His thesis was interesting.
He said that every American President feels that he's entitled
to lose one continent to the Soviet Union, so you may as well
hang on to the one you've got, rather than to give his replace-
ment a sense that he has fresh countries to give away.
Do you think that there are reasons to suppose that the
events of the past few months, the salami events of the past few
months, have alerted the President to at least the necessity to
reinvigorate the CIA?
GENERAL WALTERS: I think there are the beginnings of
that perception.
You know, I'II never forget. I went to see Peron once
after he returned to Argentina. And we were talking about the
various things he'd said he was going to do in Madrid before he
came home. And I asked him about this. And he said, "You know,
how different the panorama is from Madrid and from inside the
Casa Rosada (?)," the Argentine White House.
It looks easy on the outside. When you get in, it's
more difficult.
But one of the principal problems of the intelligence
community has been its politicization. The outs think it's ter-
rible when you're furnishing this intelligence to the ins. Then
you have an election and the ins go out and the outs come in.
The old outs, now ins, think it's marvelous. They've changed
their whole view about it. But the old ins, who are now out,
think its immoral to be giving this to the new ins.
BUCKLEY: And this is simply -- this is not a partisan
point you're making; it's simply a point of human nature.
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GENERAL WALTERS: No. It's true of both parties.
BUCKLEY: General, in your book you stress that the
intelligence function has to do only in part with collecting
information. It has primarily and ultimately to do with intuiting
the enemy's intentions.
My question is the following: Have we reached a point
in which the intentions of the Soviet Union are an easy deduction
from the nature of their military planning?
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, the overall intentions, I think,
were laid down in the will of Peter the Great: push everywhere.
The intentions -- when you look at the Soviet Union today,
which has achieved a military force far greater than is necessary
to deter anyone from attacking the Soviet Union, and you see the
sacrifices that are being imposed on the Russian people to con-
tinue and expand this, I believe that there's no way you can com-
pare the economy of a free state, where things belong to private
enterprise, and a state where the government controls all the
means of production and distribution and movement. I would say
the Soviet Union of today is spending more money on defense than
the United States out of a gross national product less than half
the size of ours.
Now, as to the ultimate intentions, I think they're clear.
I mean Brezhnev has told us, Khrushchev has told us. We have re-
fused to believe what they tell us. We hope it isn't true.
But here again...
BUCKLEY: To say nothing of that talkative admiral.
GENERAL WALTERS: Yes, Admiral Gorshkov.
BUCKLEY: Yes.
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, I usually go around the world
handing out copies of "Red Star Rising at Sea." I think it's very
helpful.
Basically, the intentions have never changed. The tactics
have changed; the strategic purpose has never changed. Regardless
of the changes of government in the Soviet Union, whether you went
from Stalin to Malenkov to Khrushchev to Brezhnev, there is a con-
tinuity we cannot hope to match, unless we develop some of the con-
sensus we used to have, unless we have politics stop at the water's
edge. That has not been the case in the last few years.
BUCKLEY: Well, why is there such apparent apathy? Why
is it difficult for Congress to pass a realistic defense budget in
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such circumstances as you describe? You just finished saying that
the media operates the United States. Well, the media certainly is
in a position to pass on, and indeed has passed on, raw information
about the frenetic pace of Soviet military expansionism. Why is
there no ---- why is there no reaction, sensible reaction on the part
of the public?
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, a good deal of this is presented
in a rather non-alarmist fashion. You know, I'm not saying the
media run the whole United States. I.say that Americans get their
information largely from the media, and that forms public opinion.
Now, I noticed the other day on two of the biggest news-
papers in this country -- on one it was on page 12 and on the other
it was on page 20. There was a four-line dispatch saying, "Private
property has been abolished in Vietnam in order to avoid black market
speculation." I do not marvel at the news; I marvel at the brevity
of it, on page 12 and page 20. Had this happened anywhere else, I
have a feeling it would have been presented in a much more alarming
fashion to Americans.
But, you see, we are constantly led to believe that the
Soviet Union -- the Cold War is over and that detente is new and
the Soviet Union doesn't have horrible things in store for us. That
is a delusion. It is a happy delusion, and people like good news.
You know, in the old days they used to kill the bringers of bad news.
Some of that lingers with us.
BUCKLEY: Well, let me ask you this: Are there -- is there
detailed intelligence information, which you have not divulged nor
are at liberty to divulge, which, if the American people knew it,
would cause them realistic alarm, about, for instance, the specific
nature of certain Soviet weaponry, about the configuration of the
MIRVed missiles, that sort of thing?
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, I think all of that has been made
public. But it's presented in a rather factual, rather non-alarmist
fashion. You get somewhere -- if you read a dispatch on page 5 or
page 8, you'll find that in the Far East there are 15,000 Soviet
tanks, modern, facing 5000 antique Chinese tanks; that in Western
Europe there are 20,000 Soviet tanks facing 7000 NATO tanks. But
this is not picked up as presenting -- because it goes back to the
old story of, "Oh, the Soviets have suffered great trauma by the
various invasions, and they want to protect themselves," and so
forth and so on.
I think if you look -- you know, if it has paws like a
lion, a mane like a lion, it roars like a lion, there's a high per-
centage of probability that it just might be a lion.
BUCKLEY: Well, do you consider...
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BUCKLEY: Do you consider that President Nixon is sub-
stantially at fault, inasmuch as his tradition as a realist in
international affairs, combined with the initiation of detente
under his patronage, was the final anesthetic affecting this
American torpor?
GENERAL WALTERS: I don't think I could say that. I
think he had a rather realistic attitude towards the view of the
Soviets' intentions towards us. He was pressed by being a minority
President in the Congress, he was pressed later by Watergate, he
was pressed by other things, he was pressed by what was popular.
But I don't think he himself had any illusions about the Soviets'
intentions concerning us.
BUCKLEY: Why is it that when he ran his triumphant cam-
paign in 1972 he didn't pay the kind of stress to this problem that
would be appropriate? -
GENERAL WALTERS: Because it wasn't popular and probably
wouldn't have got him elected by as large a majority as he was
reelected by.
BUCKLEY: Well, certainly the contrary didn't do George
McGovern much good, did it?
BUCKLEY: So are you willing to go so far as to say
that he missed an opportunity to inform the American people?
GENERAL WALTERS: I think he thought he could manipulate
this to our advantage. It's like the multiple people who believe
that you can use the communists. Nobody uses the communists.
BUCKLEY: Didn't you use them, ever?
GENERAL WALTERS: I'd like to be able to say yes. I
may have had some tiny little advantages here and there. But in
the long term, I can't say I ever used them, no.
BUCKLEY: At I-east you'd know what they were saying to
each other when they whispered in Russian, right?
GENERAL WALTERS: Yes.
BUCKLEY: Mr. Silvan Meyer is our examiner. Mr. Meyer
is the publisher of Miami magazine, president of Meyer Publications,
and formerly editor of the Miami News.
SILVAN MEYER: Mr. Buckley, General, I feel that we really
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need to go back to a couple of topics that you discussed earlier,
on the function of an intelligence community in a democratic soci-
ety. And since both of you gentlemen have a history of affiliation
with the CIA -- and I don't say that that has colored your judgment,
but I do think it may have given you -?- or, persuaded you in par-
ticular directions as far as information is concerned.
And I think when we talk about intelligence secrecy, I
would have to say I don't think most Americans want intelligence
secrets revealed. What Americans want is what is the policy of
our intelligence.
And I would like to ask you about the practice of aggres-
sive intelligence politically in other countries which we practiced
for a period of history prior to Vietnam, when there was indeed a
consensus that we had to insert ourselves politically in other coun-
tries to counteract similar subversion by the communists.
But in this area that's less serious or less immediate
than assassination, the whole area of trying to influence the poli-
tical direction of another country from the inside, the development
of political sympathizers...
BUCKLEY: Your question is, what was the attitude of
friendly governments to America doing this?
MEYER: No. My question is, now, do you believe we should
resume, or have we resumed, this kind of covert activity? I'm not
talking about finding secrets and passing notes in hollow trees.
I'm talking about developing a political attitude sympathetic to our
own.
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, I don't know what we're doing cur-
rently, because I've been gone from there for a year and a half. I
would devotedly hope that we have.
MEYER: But have not we made some serious errors in
attempting this, such as Chile, such as Vietnam, where...
GENERAL WALTERS: I'm not sure Chile was an error. Now,
this is not a popular position.
We see 42,000 Cubans spread around Africa today acting
contrary to the interests of the United States. If Salvador had
remained President of Chile, we might have had another 42,000 Cubans
doing the same thing.
BUCKLEY: Chileans.
GENERAL WALTERS: Anybody who thinks Salvador Allende was
not a deadly enemy of the United States is deceiving himself.
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BUCKLEY: Well, he was a most articulate and outspoken
admirer of Fidel Castro.
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, Fidel Castro went to Chile and
spent 52 days there. I think it was the longest state visit in...
MEYER: Be that as it may, have we not, in a way, des-
troyed, through our actions in Chile, the credibility of that sort
of CIA activity as far as the American people are concerned? I'm
not saying that we should not pursue this sort of activity, but I
think there's a perception in the American people that we aren't
pursuing it very well or very competently.
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, first of all, there is a general
misunderstanding of what happened in Chile. I was at CIA. I was
the number two there at the time that this happened.
The CIA had no contact whatsoever with General Pinochet
or the military who overthrew Salvador Allende. All contact with
that group was broken off more than a year before the revolution
which overthrew Allende.
The CIA had given assistance to democratic newspapers and
democratic parties that were resisting the attempts of Allende to
put them out of business.
Now, on the 22nd of May, the Chilean Supreme Court, in the
year before he was overthrown, said, "This President, by his crass
disregard for the Constitution, has placed himself outside its
protection." On the 20th of June, the Comptroller General of the
nation said, "This President, by his ruthless-disregard for all of
the restrictions placed upon the President, is violating the Consti-
tution." The Chilean House of Representatives passed a resolution,
I remember, on my mother's birthday, the 22nd of October, again re-
peating that the President had violated the Constitution.
Now, the CIA -- the information is the CIA was doing some-
thing in Chile, therefore it overthrew Allende. This is not a fact.
ception?
BUCKLEY: But answer his question. Is it an American per-
GENERAL WALTERS: It is an American perception that we.did.
BUCKLEY: Why?
GENERAL WALTERS: Because that's the way it was presented
BUCKLEY: Why?
GENERAL WALTERS: That's a good question.
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MEYER: But if policies were revealed, if policies were
revealed to the people.-- I'm not talking about the specific tech-
nical secrets and the exchanges of information...
MEYER: But if the policies, if the policies were revealed,
then would not the American people support this? And if mistakes
were made in the execution of the policy, then might not the Ameri-
can people be more sympathetic with their intelligence establishment?
GENERAL WALTERS: I don't believe you can operate an intel-
ligence service if you reveal your intelligence policies, because
you're not revealing them to the American people, you're revealing
them to the Soviet Union, to China, or any other of your enemies.
MEYER: Why should It be a secret that we want to influence
what used to be British Guiana, Guyana, or South Vietnam, when there
was one, where we did make these attempts? Why should it be a secret
that we want to influence these countries in a democratic direction?
GENERAL WALTERS: It's only a secret in the United States.
BUCKLEY: Well, you're violating local laws, is the main
GENERAL WALTERS: First of all, you're violating local
laws. Secondly, you have things like -- for instance, some powers
ask you not to say -- they say, "It's all right if you do this, but
just don't talk about it."
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, recently this nuclear reactor on
the top of this mountain in India. You know, the Indians announced
great indignation for it. Then when they got back to their files,
they found that the present Prime Minister of India was the Defense
Minister who authorized it.
This idea that you can operate an intelligence service
in Macy's window is a naive delusion. I know it isn't popular to
say this, but you can't do it.
Just if I may tell one other story about a Soviet spy
recruited in the United States, and he goes back to the United
States, and three years later they come for him, and the Soviet
agent comes and looks at the building and he sees, "Jones, Ground
Floor, Right." And so he pushes the door button and he says, "Mr.
Jones, I am from the Center."
And the man said, "You've got the wrong Jones. I'm Jones
the tailor. Jones the spy is on the third floor." .
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MEYER: Yes. I've heard this story.
I've been trying to discover -- because I was, as an
editorial writer, an advocate of covert action in order to prevail
on supposedly neutral countries to follow our point of view rather
than the Soviet point of view. And I have to stand on what I wrote
15 or 20 years ago.
GENERAL WALTERS: But every country in the world...
MEYER: But what did that prevent?
GENERAL WALTERS: Everything.
MEYER: Where has that -- where has that succeeded? And
is not one of the reasons for the failures that we've seen in this
kind of covert activity the fact that the American people did not
know about it?
Now, I don't mean that the people have to know exactly
what's going on in the specific country. But I think we do have
a right to believe that the policies espoused by our President are
those that are being executed covertly or overtly. And I think
this turned out not to be the case. And is this not...
GENERAL WALTERS: Where was it not the case? Where did
the CIA do something the President hadn't directed them to do?
MEYER: I can't say that.
GENERAL WALTERS: I think it'd be difficult to find one.
MEYER: But what I do say is that I think the people
heard the President state policies, and later heard of covert
actions that did not match the policies that were stated.
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, you know, they had one of these
voice-stress Indicators, and I think every President that they've
run through it has been proved not to be telling the whole truth
at some point or another. The idea that a chief of state must
reveal everything he's doing...
You know, interesting to me at the U-2 conference was
the fact that the Russians did not regard Eisenhower's admittance
that we had organized the U-2 as anything other than a gesture of
contempt towards them. They would never have admitted it. And
when he admitted it they thought, "He must care so little about
our capability to retaliate or our anger, that he doesn't mind
saying it publicly."
You cannot -- I repeat -- you cannot run an intelligence
service and covert operations in public. It is impossible.
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MEYER: But one of the things that's led to the present
situation, which is, I think, a rather deplorable lack of credi-
bility in our intelligence services...
GENERAL WALTERS: Specify.
HEYER: Well, I'm being -- specifically in regard to what
appears to be support of governments that are in some respects un-
savory in the American -- in the American view.
GENERAL WALTERS: Now, who's the tribunal for who's
savory or unsavory?
BUCKLEY: Yeah. And besides, all governments are, in
some respects, unsavory, including our own.
GENERAL WALTERS: Including our own.
MEYER: Well, I would agree that our governments occa-
sionally do unsavory things. But where our policies seem to help
governments that have been oppressive, dictatorial, etcetera, then
when these -- when circumstances fall apart and we have problems
in these countries, then the American people feel that our govern-
ment has made a mistake, and it made the mistake in secret.
GENERAL WALTERS: Winston Churchill, on being informed
that Germany had attacked the Soviet Union, said, "I would make a
pact with the devil himself to defeat...."
BUCKLEY: Which is not very good theology, by the way.
GENERAL WALTERS: Not very good theology, but it's a
sign of a certain amount of realism. You can't pick and choose.
There aren?t that many democratic governments around the world.
You can count the really democratic governments on the fingers of
two hands.
Now, the unsavory of governments is a relative thing.
For instance, today the average person thinks Chile is pretty
horrible. Well, I will bet you that Mr. Ceausescu in Romania is
doing away with more people in one month than President Pinochet
has done away with In three years.
BUCKLEY: Yeah. And Ceausescu arrives in Washington
and is compared to Thomas Jefferson by the President of the United
States.
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, just to take the question of
religion. Every Catholic bishop in Romania has been forced to
join the Orthodox Church or go to jail.
MEYER: Let me go back to Vietnam for a monent. In your
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book, you say that -- you refer to our leaving Vietnam and you
limit your coment, and say that you're limiting your comment, to
the fact that we departed Vietnam because of a loss of resolution.
GENERAL WALTERS: That's right.
MEYER: I'd like to go a little further as to what you
mean by that loss of resolution. If we had stuck to it, do you
think we might have prevailed?
GENERAL WALTERS: I think at any time, without the use
of nuclear weapons, within 30 days we could have brought the
Vietnam War to a successful conclusion. I would suggest to any-
body who doubts this to talk to some of the released prisoners
about what happened during the heavy Christmastime bombing. You
will find that the guards were coming to them and saying, "If
your people get here, you'll tell them I treated you well, won't
you?"
I know, as the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence,
that on the day that massive bombing was stopped, there was one
day's supply of surface-to-air missiles left in North Vietnam.
BUCKLEY: Did Nixon know it?
GENERAL WALTERS: I don't think he knew it right at that
time, but we've known it ex post facto.
You know, Napoleon once said, "Victory belongs to the
guy who holds out to the last 15 minutes."
And as a result of the loss of Vietnam, we are now in
the position that Britain and France were in after Munich. We
have lost our credibility. Nobody believes us anymore.
MEYER: But part of what went on in Vietnam, and part
of the reason for our lack of perseverance, was the political
situation in South Vietnam itself, the corruption inside that
government, which has been fairly widely reported.
Now, here again, we were in a situation that to many
Americans was Ideologically untenable.
GENERAL WALTERS: I think "fairly widely reported" is
an understatement of the fact.
Let me tell you something. You can get out of Vietnam
right now by paying 33 [unintelligible] of gold. In any country
where a Cabinet minister earns $300 a month, no one expects him
to live on it.
And one final item. As a newspaperman, it will interest
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29
you. In the time of President Thieu in South Vietnam, there were
30 daily newspapers in Saigon. Six of them were pretty much in
opposition to the government. Now, they'd get closed for a day
or a week or a month. But then they'd reappear. Do you know
how many newspapers there are in South Vietnam now? One.
Now, that may be an improvement in the eyes of some
people. I don't think it is, from the point of view of the
freedom of the press.
BUCKLEY: I might remind you that the British suspended
all elections during their war. So it's a little bit difficult
to exact from the South Vietnamese conduct that Winston Churchill,
after a thousand years' experience with democracy, was not able
to conduct.
GENERAL WALTERS: But there are no elections in North
Vietnam, ever.
MEYER: What I'm really attempting to do is to take
the devil's advocate position on the question of the effective-
ness of covert intelligence. In a political situation, even in
a pre-combat situation, where we had ample opportunity to prac-
tice this in Vietnam, and apparently it didn't work.
Is that an accurate assessment?
GENERAL WALTERS: Oh, no. Oh, no. What did work is
the other side rapidly perceived that the U.S. Government was not
going to conduct the war to victory.
If we'd told Adolf Hitler, as we told the North Viet-
namese, that under no circumstances were we going to invade
Germany, when do you think the war would have ended?
MEYER: Wasn't one of the reasons, though, that the
enemy perceived this was that we had by and large failed to per-
ceive what was in essence a civil war in Vietnam, and failed to
bring a sufficient amount of the populous to our point of view?
GENERAL WALTERS: It was a civil war, probably in the
same sense that the American Revolution was.
BUCKLEY: Well, If I may disagree with you, I think much
less. It was absolutely established in 1975, when, without any
adornment, the North Vietnamese simply moved in orthodox military
fashion, that it was a North Vietnamese invasion. And that to
the extent that they had sympathizers in the South, they were
relying on them only exiguously.
GENERAL WALTERS: Well, I was in Vietnam, and the amount
of Southern sympathy was not large. During the Tet offensive,
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30
when they came into the cities, no one rose to join them. In
the final days of the offensive, we saw these incredible spec-
tacles of hundreds of thousands of people fleeing in blind
terror, because they knew what was going to follow: a police
state of the first magnitude, about which nobody talks. We're
all busy talking about Cambodia and about Chile, and about this
and about the other. The North Vietnamese have inaugurated
in Vietnam a regime ten times as repressive as anything that
ever preceded it, even under French colonial rule.
BUCKLEY: Thank you, General Walters, the author of
Silent Missions, described as "Five Presidents used his talents,
millions of have seen his photograph. Now read his enthralling
story." And thank you very much, Mr. Meyer. Ladies and gentle-
men of Miami, thank you.
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