REMARKS OF WILLIAM J. CASEY DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE BEFORE THE BUSINESS COUNCIL AT THE HOMESTEAD HOT SPRINGS, VA 8 MAY 1982

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP83M00914R001900210045-4
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 9
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 21, 2007
• Sequence Number: 45
• Publication Date: May 7, 1982
• Content Type: REPORT

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NAY 7 42
REMARKS OF WILLIAM J. CASEY
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
BEFORE
THE BUSINESS COUNCIL
AT
THE HOMESTEAD
HOT SPRINGS, VIRGINIA
Saturday, 8 May 1982
4aolv
P83M00914R001900210045-4
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Always a pleasure to come down to these surroundings and exchange ideas
with you. We have an American intelligence service to provide the executive
and legislative branches of our government with information and understanding
about the forces in the world which can threaten or improve our security and
other national interests.
My job is to run and further develop a huge apparatus of technical
marvels and trained observers capable of sweeping up and gathering facts and
perceptions from all over the world and, more important and challenging, to
identify and focus these capabilities on the vulnerabilities and opportunities
that are critical to our interests.
Today, we are as a nation challenged at many levels and I thought it
would be useful this morning to review these challenges and indicate where
and how over the last year we've developed new perceptions on their nature
and how they might be dealt with. In many of these areas government can't
see and do everything and you in the private sector Nave perceptions and
capabilities that can be very important.
The most potentially devastating challenge comes from the nuclear missiles
aimed at us. I expect the President to address that threat this weekend so -
I'll pass this morning.
The second threat comes from the Warsaw Pact, land, air and sea forces
which have been gaining on NATO forces in quantity and quality. On that, I
defer to the Deputy Secretary of Defense.
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The third threat is the ability of the Soviets, directly or through
proxies, to project power southward towards the oil fields and long sought
warm water ports of Southwest Asia. We've seen this in the invasion of
Afghanistan, in troop strength on the border and headquarters exercises into
Iran and in the linking up of Soviet weapons and air transport with Cuban
troops thousands of miles from their borders in Angola and Ethiopia. In
Southeast Asia, Soviet weapons, training and money have enabled Vietnam to
impose its will on both Laos and Cambodia.
The fourth level of threat is that of surreptitious expansion or creeping
imperialism. If you color in red a map of the world the nations under some
degree of Soviet influence, close to 50 nations will be in red. Ten years
ago, only 25 nations would have been colored in red. In the ten years
between 1972 and 1982, 4 nations have extricated themselves from Soviet grasp
and 23 nations have fallen under a significantly increased degree of Soviet
influence or insurgency supported by the Soviets or their proxies. It is,
in my opinion, no coincidence that today the 11 insurgencies which are under
way throughout the world supported by Russia, Cuba, Libya and South Yemen
happen to be close to the natural resources and the choke points in the world
sea lanes on which the United States and its allies must rely to fuel and
supply their economic life. For the Soviets, destabilization, subversion and
the backing of insurgents in other countries around the world has proven
attractive and relatively risk free. Moscow can deny involvement, label such
conflicts as internal, and warn self-righteously against "outside interference."
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 internal peace and economic stability of a small
country.
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Production declines, investment is driven away and the resulting economic
dissatisfaction brings more recruits to the insurgent forces.
A fifth level of threat is in the exploitation of indigenous religious
and political and other regional tensions. The most immediately dangerous
may be the Shia and Sunni Moslem tensions running through Iran, Iraq, Syria
and other states on the Persian Gulf which could bring heavy Soviet influence
into the oil regions of the Middle East. Similar tensions exist to be inflamed
and exploited between Arabs and Jews, moderate and radical Arabs and blacks
and whites in Africa. The Russians and Cubans are poised to exploit tension
between Gringos and Latinos in this. hemisphere if the Falklands and other
latent territorial disputes get out of hand.
Now I would like to lay out the skills and assets, the vulnerabilities
and ineptitudes which accentuate these threats and must be exploited or
overcome if we are to protect ourselves and our heritage. In many of these
areas understanding and participation by the private sector can be of the
utmost importance.
Again I will leave to the Deputy Secretary of Defense the need to cope
with the enormous Soviet buildup in military power.
Over and above that, we must understand and deal with an awesome range
of additional Soviet capabilities. The first is their ability to get a
free ride on our research and development.
We have learned that the accuracy, precision and power of Soviet weapons,
which we now must counter with budget busting appropriations, are based on
Western technology to a greater extent than we had ever dreamed. The Soviet
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political and military services, 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 US, 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 exploiting our open literature and our Freedom of Information Act. We
need to sensitize and police our scientists, engineers and sales forces
against dummy customers and forged papers which funnel sensitive equipment
and knowledge behind the Iron Curtain.
The second is their skill in propaganda which continually puts us at
a disadvantage. While our intelligence has shown the Soviets carrying off
the biggest peacetime military buildup in history, deploying over.200 missiles
targeted at Western Europe and using chemical and bacteriological weapons
against the freedom fighters and their women and children. in Afghanistan and
Indo-China, they have succeeded in painting the United States as a threat to
peace.
This is accomplished through their political and intelligence apparatus
in a far-flung and many-sided campaign of what they call active measures.
Our intelligence can identify the distortions of these active measures but
to develop the necessary instruments and links to expose and rebut them the
private sector in the free world will have to carry much of the load. That's
a challenge I put directly to you.
A third Soviet asset is the weapon of military hardware and advisors.
The Soviets and their proxies actively pump arms, money and other forms of
assistance (such as training) into many Third World areas which are already
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seething with domestic discontent. The Soviets offer better prices, better
terms and better deliveries in providing weapons which bring Soviet influence
and advisors into Third World countries.
The increasing availability.of money, arms and training for violence
has created a monster known as international terrorism.
There is a new class of "violence manipulators" we can expect to see
grow in importance over the next few years which includes: sub-national
terrorist groups, harbored willingly or unwillingly by various states, which
seek to disrupt Western societies; Third World countries willing to exploit
the tools of terrorism directly for their own ends; and larger powers which.
desire to manipulate international events without running the risks of formal
military confrontation.
None of these actors operates wholly independently. The Soviet Union
has provided funding and support for terrorist operations via Eastern Europe
and its client nations like Libya or Cuba. With tacit Soviet approval many
groups have trained together in Cuba, Libya, Iraq, South Yemen and Lebanon.
Informal alliances among the members of different groups have often occurred.
Terrorism, on the whole, is too complex an issue to be easily explained
away as an example of Soviet interventionism. Even if the Soviet Union
withdrew all patronage, terrorist activity would certainly continue, perhaps
unabated. Terror has other independent patrons, currently the most prominent
being Libya.
Moreover, sub-national terrorist groups have matured into self-sustaining
organisms; there is no organic need for a master conspiracy. Terrorist
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organizations are not mirror images of each other, even when there is a
broad intersection of interest. Each group learns from the. experiences of
others, its tactics evolving in response to governmental countermeasures and
in the spotlight of media publicity.
The Intelligence Community must not only identify these threats but it
must also spot the conditions which create vulnerability and diagnose and
help develop the capabilities needed to meet them. Subversion and insurgency
exploit instability. We have established a Center for the Study of Insurgency
and Instability which uses a wide range of techniques and methodologies to
provide advance warning of instability and potential for destabilization in
order to protect us from the embarrassment from being caught by surprise as
we were in Iran. The small and weak countries in which insurgencies can be
fostered and developed to overthrow governments do not need and cannot handle
expensive and sophisticated weapons which virtually all of them clamor for.
What they need is light arms to defend themselves against externally trained
and supported guerrillas, good intelligence, good police methods, good
communications, training in small arms and their use in small unit actions,
mobility to keep up with the hit-and-run tactics of guerrilla forces. We
can introduce an element of stability into the Third World by helping small
countries to develop those skills and capabilities for a fraction of our
foreign aid budget.
El Salvador provides an example of how we can help these beleaguered
nations to defend themselves. The training of El Salvadoran troops and officers
in the United States imparted new capabilities to the government Army. The
success of the recent elections in El Salvador came largely from developing
new intelligence sources and showing the El Salvadoran Army how to use
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intelligence to break up guerrilla formations before they could attack
provincial capitals in order to stop the voting. This resulted in the
American television audience seeing in living color Usulatan, the provincial
capital nearest Nicaragua, with its streets empty and its inhabitants
huddled behind closed doors as guerrillas fired their rifles at.doorways.
Then, a minute later, they saw in the rest of the country long lines of
people patiently waiting in the hot sun to cast their vote. That contrast
in a few minutes wiped out weeks of distortion about what is happening in
Central America. We are helping other countries threatened with subversion,
insurgency and terrorism to develop their own intelligence, counter insurgency
and quick reaction rescue capabilities. -
In the final analysis, all these threats boil down to a struggle for
the hearts and minds of men. The courage of the Afghan freedom fighters,
supported by arms and training provided by other nations, escalates the price
and deters armed insurrection everywhere. The world has seen the Communist
system fail in Poland. Many Third World countries have tried the Communist
model and discovered that it doesn't work. The Soviets have been kicked out
of Egypt, Sudan and Somalia. But to hold their people, leaders in these
harrassed countries needed to show that ties with the West do yield economic
benefits. Even a modest Western presence enhancing their trade and production
and creating some jobs is all. that they need to point to. Here the American
private sector can play a far more significant role than government aid.
What is needed in the Third World is not steel mills and power plants but
entrepreneurial activity suited to the prevailing level of economic opportunity.
That's the vision which President Reagan projected at the Cancun Summit.
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The Intelligence Commuity has focused attention on the enormous economic
problems which the Soviets are facing at home. Assessments have been produced
on Soviet economic dependency on Western trade, on Soviet military use of
Western technology, on the need for Western credits and energy markets to
save the Soviets from a devastating hard currency squeeze in the years
immediately ahead, on how forces in the global economy are likely to impact
our competitive position, our balance of payments, our capital formation
and the industrial base on which our national security must rest. These
are some of the ways intelligence can protect both our national security and
.economic interest from threats emanating from external sources.
But we have a propensity for shooting ourselves in the foot.' One of
these self-inflicted wounds is permitting ourselves to be the only country
in the world which gives foreign intelligence agencies and anyone else a
license to poke into our files. I question very seriously whether a secret
intelligence agency and the Freedom of Information Act can co-exist for very
long. The willingness of the foreign intelligence services to share information
and rely onus fully, and of individuals to risk their lives and reputations
to help us will continue to dwindle away unless we get rid of the Freedom
of Information Act. Secrecy is essential to any intelligence organization.
Ironically, secrecy is.accepted without protest in many areas of our society.
Physicians, lawyers, clergymen, grand juries, journalists, income tax returns,
crop futures -- all have confidential aspects protected by law. Why should
national security information be entitled to any less protection? I'm not
asking for any retreat.from our commitment to protecting essential liberties
but only to bear in mind, as Justice Goldberg once said, that "while the
Constitution protects against invasions of individual rights, it is not a
suicide pact."