THE AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00901R000400110004-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 17, 2005
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: April 1, 1982
• Content Type: STUDY

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ARTICLE APPEARED CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF THE PRESIDENCY
Oil PpE._._.L SPRING 1982
THE AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY*
by
THE HONORABLE WILLIAM J. CASEY
Director of Central Intelligence
Recognition of the need for intelligence
concerning the intentions of our adver-
saries is as old as the nation itself. During
the War of Independence General Wash-
ington observed:
The necessity of procuring good intelli-
gence is apparent and need not be fur-
ther urged-all that remains for me to
add is, that you keep the whole matter
as secret as possible. For upon secrecy,
success depends in most enterprises of
the kind, and for the want of it, they
are generally defeated, however well
planned and promising a favorable
issue.
During the first 165 years of our
nation's history, however, we were able to
exist behind the security of wide oceans
and friendly borders and the need for
intelligence was episodic. The world
changed drastically for America in gener-
al, and for the fledgling intelligence com-
munity in particular, on December 7,
1941 and, for better or worse, it will never
again be the same. The United States no
longer enjoys the splendid isolation that
its oceans and borders once provided, and
it must now exist in a world in which the
minimum period of warning in the event
of nuclear attack is counted in less than 20
minutes.
As a result, we have today a national in-
telligence community made up of more
scholars in the social and physical sciences
than any campus can boast. It uses pho-
tography, electronics, acoustics and other
technological marvels to gather facts from
the four corners of the globe and informs
the public, as we saw in the SALT debate,
of the precise capabilities of weapons on
the other side of the globe which the
Soviets keep most secret.
The first priority in our intelligence
work is still the Soviet Union. It is the
only country in the world with major
weapons systems directly targeted at the
United States which could destroy the
U.S. in half an hour. We put the largest
slice of our resources into the task of
understanding Soviet military capabili-
ties, which have grown enormously in pre-
cision, accuracy and sophistication as well
as power.
Our superior technology defends
against Soviet military advantages in man-
power and sheer volume of weaponry. A
television documentary on the KGB
shown by the Canadian Broadcasting
Company a few months ago, for example,
concluded that the theft of inertial
guidance technology by Soviet intelligence
improved the accuracy of Soviet ICBM's
and made U.S. land-based missiles vul-
nerable, thereby creating the need to build
the MX missile system as a replacement at
a cost of 30 to 60 billion dollars.
The Soviet political and military ser-
vices, KGB and GRU, have for years been
training young scientists to target and
roam the world to acquire technology for
their military arsenal from the U.S.,
Western Europe, Japan and anywhere
else. They have acquired technology
worth many billions by purchase, legal
and illegal, by theft, by espionage, by
bribery, by scientific exchanges and by ex-
ploiting our open literature and our
Freedom of Information Act.
George Washington, wherever he is,
and people in other countries, must find it
puzzling that our Government permits
any person, including an officer of an an-
tagonistic intelligence service, to apply for
documents from our intelligence records
and demand lengthy legal justification if
they are denied.
' This essay is based upon an address delivered by
Director Casey March 13, 1982 in Washington D.C.
at the Thirteenth Annual Student Symposium spon.
sored by the Center for the Study of the Presidency.
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A law that is grounded in the presump-
tion that all Government records should
be accessible to the public, unless the
Government can justify in detail a com-
pelling national security rationale for
withholding them, unwarrantedly dis-
rupts the effective operation of an intelli-
gence agency.
Thus for reasons of security as well as
efficiency, there is a strong current of opin-
ion in this Administration-and I believe
in the Congress and the public-in favor
of some modification of the Freedom of
Information Act and other questionable
burdens imposed on intelligence and other
Government activities. I wish to em-
phasize that this does not represent a
retreat from our Government's historic
and cherished commitment to protecting
essential liberties. But we should bear in
mind, as Justice Goldberg once said, that
"while the Constitution protects against
invasions of individual rights, it is not a
suicide pact."
Secrecy is essential to any intelligence
organization. Ironically, secrecy is ac-
cepted without protest in many areas of
our society. Physicians, lawyers, clergy-
men, and grand juries, journalists, in-
come tax returns, crop futures-all have
confidential aspects protected by law.
Why should national security information
be entitled to any less protection?
There was a time when intelligence had
most of its job done when it had counted
and measured the capabilities of weapons
of destruction, followed indications and
warnings of their use and passed this in-
formation to the military for appropriate
action.
Today we also need to assess and deal
with a whole range of initiatives and tac-
tics-diplomacy, subversion, disinforma-
tion, destabilization, provision of sophisti-
cated weapons, support and exploitation
of terrorism and insurgency.
The emergence of this new array of in-
tangible weapons which influence, erode
and undermine on a worldwide scale
places a wholly different and far wider re-
sponsibility on intelligence. It is a respon-
sibility which was neglected as the Intelli-
gence Community lost 50% of its people
and 40%u of its funding during the 1970s
and, at the time, was forced to give high
priority to following a Soviet military and
political threat growing rapidly in magni-
tude and in sophistication.
We face a skill in propaganda which
continually puts us at a disadvantage.
While American intelligence has shown
the Soviets carrying off the biggest peace-
time military buildup in history, deploy-
ing over 200 missiles targeted at Western
Europe and using chemical and bacterio-
logical weapons against women and chil-
dren in Afghanistan and Indo-China, they
have succeeded in painting the United
States as the threat to peace.
This is accomplished through their poli-
tical and intelligence apparatus in a far-
flung and many-sided campaign of what
they call active measures. Our intelligence
must continue to identify the distortions
of this propaganda and establish the
truths to combat it.
If we look beyond Europe where a com-
bination of these active measures and not
too subtle intimidation seeks to divide us
from our allies, we see the other contin-
ents of the world plagued and beleagured
by subversion and witch's brew of destabi-
lization, terrorism and insurgency fueled
by Soviet arms, Cuban manpower and
Libyan money, with East Germany,
North Korea, and the PLO chipping in
special skills and experience. It's impor-
tant to understand how all this works.
Beginning in 1974 and 1975, the Soviet
Union undertook a new, much more ag-
gressive strategy in the Third World. They
found destabilization, subversion and the
backing of insurgents in other countries
around the world attractive and relatively
risk free. Exploiting the availability first
of Cuba and subsequently of other coun-
tries to serve as Soviet surrogates or prox-
ies, they have been able to limit the
political, economic and military cost of
intervention.
In the aftermath of Vietnam, the Soviet
Union soon began to test whether the
U.S. would resist foreign-provoked and
supported instability and insurgence else-
where in the Third World. Fully aware of
the political climate in this country, in the
1970s they developed an aggressive stra-
tegy in the Third World. It avoided direct
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confrontation and instead exploited local
and regional circumstances to take maxi-
mum advantage of third-country forces
(or surrogates) to attain Soviet objectives.
This enables Moscow to deny involve-
ment, to label such conflicts as internal,
and to warn self-righteously against "out-
side interference." There is little disagree-
ment among analysts that Soviet and
proxy successes in the mid- to late-70s in
Angola, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Nicaragua
and elsewhere have encouraged the So-
viets to rely on and support the Cubans,
Vietnamese and, recently, the Libyans
ever more aggressively.
Over the last several years, the Soviets
and their allies have supported, directly or
indirectly, radical regimes or insurgencies
in more than a dozen countries in every
part of the Third World. The United
States and its friends have had difficulty
countering these insurgencies. It is much
easier and much less expensive to support
an insurgency than it is for us and our
friends to resist one. It takes relatively few
people and little support to disrupt the in-
ternal peace and economic stability of a
small country.
It's truly remarkable the way the com-
bination of money and manpower from
two tiny countries, Cuba and Libya, with
skills and arms provided by the Soviet
Union and its satellites like Vietnam,
North Korea, and East Germany, has ter-
rorized four continents over the last ten
years.
Subversion and terrorism destabilize
existing governments. Insurgency is or-
ganized and supplied with weapons and
experienced guerrilla leaders. Manpower
is brought for training to Cuba, Lebanon,
South Yemen, Bulgaria or Libya, where
terrorists training camps seem to make up
the second largest industry next to oil.
Terrorism, the sophisticated terrorism
of today, is big business and requires big
money. Safehouses in safe areas, modern
secure weapons, travel documents, trans-
portation, etc., are very expensive. Ter-
rorists need more than money. They re-
quire safe training sites, use of diplomatic
bags, safe embassies, multiple travel
documents, they need a country to back
them. Qadhafi has been picking up a large
slice of this and has attempted-by act or
by just leaks of an act -to strike at senior
American officials at home and abroad.
In so doing he has caused disruption of
our normal way of life on the official
level, the expenditure of millions, and
some degree of skepticism among our
allies about our intelligence and subse-
quent actions. All this at very little cost
and a great deal of "revolutionary"
publicity for him. He also, at one time or
another, tried to assassinate Nimeriri and
Sadat, his neighbors in Sudan and Egypt.
Cuba is the other worldwide trouble-
maker. For a nation of ten million people,
Cuba has displayed a remarkable reach on
a worldwide scale. It has 70,000 military
and civilian advisors abroad in almost 30
countries. Of these more than half are
military. Over 40,000 are in Africa, and
some 7,000 in the Middle East. There are
12,000 Cuban technical trainees working
in Czechoslovakia and East Germany,
and 5-6,000 studying in the Soviet Union.
How did this phenomenon develop?
Part of it springs from the demographics -
the same source-a combination of over-
population and youth unemployment-
which gave us 150,000 Cuban refugees in
the Mariel boat lift. Since 1980, there has
been a surge in the 15-19 year old age
group of 50 percent.Castro has admitted
that tens of thousands of youths are out
of work. He said in a recent speech that he
would like to send 10,000 Cuban youths
to Siberia to cut timber for Cuban con-
struction projects. They have lots of
young men to train and send into other
countries-and that's the way to get
preferment in government employment in
Castro's Cuba.
The other source of Cuba's aggression
is Soviet influence and support. The
Soviets sell their weapons. Arms sales
earn about 20 percent of their hard cur-
rency. Last year they gave Cuba four
times the previous ten-year annual
average.,
In addition to free military equipment,
the Soviet Union gives Cuba $8 million a
day, or $3 billion a year, to keep its
economy going. The Russians buy sugar
at a premium and sell oil at a discount.
There is no way that Cuba could play the
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role it does in Latin America, Africa, and
the Middle East without this cash and
military support from the Soviet Union.
Moscow doesn't give away $3 to $4 billion
a year unless they have a purpose.
Today Cuba sits astride the Caribbean
with a modernized army of 150,000
troops, reserves of 100,000 and 200 Soviet
MIGs. It now has the largest military es-
tablishment in the Western Hemisphere,
save those of the U.S. and Brazil.
Cuba's recent combat experience in An-
gola and Ethiopia, together with its over-
whelming qualitative and numerical
superiority in weapons, provides it with a
particularly ominous intervention capa-
bility in the Caribbean and Central Am-
erica. This is clearly not the sole source of
violence and instability in the Caribbean
Basin, but it magnifies and international-
izes what would otherwise be local con-
flicts. Cuba's most immediate goals are to
exploit and control the revolution in
Nicaragua and to induce the overthrow of
the governments of El Salvador and Gua-
temala. At the same time, the Cuban gov-
ernment is providing advice, safehaven,
communications, training and some fi-
nancial support to several South Ameri-
can organizations. Training in Cuban
camps has been provided in the last two
years to groups from a dozen Latin Amer-
ican countries.
Today, we live in an extraordinarily
challenging world. Protected though we
may be by military might and economic
strength, we are vulnerable without an ef-
fective intelligence service. We need it to
help us judge the capabilities and inten-
tions and monitor the activities of those
with interests adverse to ours, to evaluate
changing economic and political trends
worldwide, and to anticipate danger
before it threatens.
Your generation is the first in this cen-
tury to grow entirely to maturity in a
world where the United States is being
actively pressed to defend its role as the
foremost economic and industrial power
in the world. We now face competition
from others in the free world, but we are
still very much a great nation and power.
Any country that can successfully
engineer a feat like the flawless launch
and recovery of the Columbia space shut-
tle has adequate resources and resolve to
retain its position as leader of the free
world. We all can take great pride in that
magnificent achievement.
We nevertheless must recognize that we
are now challenged as never before by
military and commercial competitors of
unprecedented strength. We can not rest
on past achievements. We have permitted
our own resources, both material and
spiritual, to be drawn down. In the pri-
vate sector, we have allowed an alarming
decline in productivity and hence in our
ability to compete in world markets. In
the governmental sector, we have contin-
ually exhausted our reserves and then bor-
rowed to cover the shortfall, compound-
ing the inflationary pressure on interest
rates and sapping public confidence in the
Government's ability to control expen-
ditures.
These trends must not be allowed to
continue. We must trim the fat, revitalize
our institutions and reaffirm our will and
purpose to work for peace and freedom.
Critical to this are the human resources
in which this nation has always been so
rich, young people with good minds and
good educations, with energy and enthusi-
asm and the confidence to tackle the diffi-
culties ahead of us. You will meet that
challenge.
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