REMARKS OF WILLIAM J. CASEY TO REPUBLICANS ABROAD ON THE AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP83M00914R002700200025-8
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 12
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 1, 2007
• Sequence Number: 25
• Publication Date: March 23, 1982
• Content Type: REPORT

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REMARK..--O,F -WILLIAM J. CASED
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
TO
REPUBLICANS ABROAD
WASHINGTON, D. C.
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THE AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY
I am happy to be here tonight for this reunion with all you
Republicans Abroad.
I thought it was nice of Newsweek to advertise this little meeting
in its Periscope section last week.
They took a shot at me by having one of those anonymous White House
aides find it outrageous for me to speak at a political fundraiser. I have
looked forward to this evening as a social occasion which would give me a
chance to visit a lot of old friends. Looking around the room, it more than
meets my expectations even if I couldn't recall a name or two.
I'm John Lord O'Brien, can you remember your name?
I greatly enjoyed my meetings with Republicans Abroad in London and
Paris during 1980 and it's nice to have all of you here in Washington.
Washington is a very pleasant place even if it is hard to figure out from
day to day where you are and where you're going. It reminds me of the old
story about Oliver Wendell Holmes late in his distinguished career on the
Supreme Court. Holmes found himself on a train. Confronted by the conductor,
he couldn't find his ticket. Recognizing the distinguished jurist, however,
the conductor told him not to worry, that he could just send in his ticket
when he found it. Holmes looked at the conductor with some irritation and
replied:
"The problem is not where my ticket is.
The problem is, where am I going?"
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Before I forget it, I want to announce a thousand dollar reward for
information establishing the existence and leading to the identification of
that whipper-snapper in the White House, who is alleged to have told Newsweek
that it is outrageous for me to speak to you tonight. I want to find out why
he gave that information to Newsweek and didn't have the courtesy or the
courage to tell me.
Also, I'd like to ask you to pass the word to Democrats Abroad that I
have some things to say that might be interesting and useful to them. You
can tell them I'm available at the same speaking fee Dick Richards is paying
me tonight.
Recognition of the need for intelligence concerning the intentions
of our adversaries is as old as the nation itself. During the War of
Independence General Washington observed:
The necessity of procuring good intelligence is apparent and
need not be further 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
on December 7, 1941 and, for better or worse, it will never again be the same.
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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 less than 20
minutes.
As a result, we have today a national intelligence community made up
of more scholars in the social-and physical-sciences than any campus can
boast. It uses photography, electronics, acoustics and other technological
marvels to gather facts from the four corners of the globe and inform 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. _
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 antagonistic intelligence service, to apply for documents from
our intelligence records and demand lengthy legal justification if they are
denied.
No other country in the world has a law which permits anyone anywhere
in the world to poke into its intelligence files and I believe that an
effective intelligence review cannot co-exist for long with the Freedom of
Information Act as it now stands.
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."
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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?
.My highest responsibi:li.ty as Director of--Central Intelligence:-is to
gather all relevant information, available from all sources, assess it, piece
it together and arrive at national estimates relevant to decisions which face
the President and the Congress on matters of national interest.
Policymakers used to get too many semantically papered over, homogenized
intelligence estimates conveying only the conventional wisdom. To avoid this,
CIA, military intelligence, and every other element of the Intelligence
Community should not only be allowed to compete and surface differences, but
be encouraged to do so. The way we work today, the chiefs of all our
intelligence agencies -- State, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, Army, Navy,
and Air Force Intelligence, FBI, Treasury, with its economic intelligence,
and Energy, with its nuclear intelligence -- sit as a board of estimates and
review national intelligence estimates. As Director of Central Intelligence,
I am charged with formulating the estimate and I have the responsibility to
see that all credible and substantiated alternative views are properly and
fully reflected. These alternative views provide a range of estimates
which help protect policymakers from the conventional wisdom.
This intelligence apparatus we have today should be especially
significant to Americans living abroad.
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Many of you, by virtue of living abroad, have special information
and special perspectives which can contribute to the process. We have a
specialized group of people charged with actively and openly developing
this contribution.
Also, living abroad these days, you're on the firing line facing a
propaganda barrage which paints-the United States as. the threat to the-peace.
How is it that there's more concern in Europe about 50 American military
advisors working for a year to help the government of El Salvador defend
itself than there is about Soviet and Polish military power moving in the
dark of a single night to extinguish freedom in Poland?
Much of this war of words is based on a distorted and slanted view
of the world and the forces at work in it. I remember talking to one of my
predecessors, Dick Helms, some fifteen years ago before he became DCI,
"When you sit here and read the reports that come through you realize how
beleaguered this country really is". Those words still ring in my memory.
It hasn't gotten any better.
We face not only military and terroristic threats but also intangible
aggression from a skill in propaganda which continually puts us at a
disadvantage. While American 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 women and children in Afghanistan and Indo-China, they have succeeded
in painting the United States as the threat to peace.
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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 must continue to identify the distortions of
this propaganda and establish the truths to combat it.
If we look beyond Europe where a combination of these active measures
and not too subtle intimidation seeks to divide us from our allies, we see
the other continents of the world plagued and beleaguered by subversion and
witch's brew of destabilization, 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 important to
understand how all this works.
Beginning in 1974 and 1975, the Soviet Union undertook a new, much more
aggressive 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 countries to serve as Soviet surrogates or proxies,
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
elsewhere in the Third World. Fully aware of the political climate in this
country, in the 1970s they developed an aggressive strategy in the Third World.
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It avoided direct confrontation and instead exploited local and regional
circumstances to take maximum advantage of Third Country forces (or
surrogates) to attain Soviet objectives. This enables Moscow to deny
involvement, to label such conflicts as internal, and to warn self-righteously
against "outside interference." There is little disagreement among our
analysts that Soviet and proxy successes in the mid-to late-70s in Angola,
Ethiopia, Cambodia, Nicaragua and elsewhere have encouraged the Soviets 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 internal peace and economic stability of a small country.
It's truly remarkable the way the combination of money and manpower
from two tiny countries, Cuba and Libya, with skills and arms provided by
the Soviet Union and it's satellites like Vietnam, North Korea, and East
Germany, has terrorized four continents over the last ten years.
Subversion and terrorism destabilize existing governments. Insurgency:,
is organized and supplied with weapons and experienced guerrilla leaders.
Manpower is brought for training to Cuba, Lebanon, South Yemen, Bulgaria or
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Libya, where terrorist 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, transportation, etc.,are very expensive. Terrorists need more
than money. They require 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.
Cuba is the other worldwide troublemaker. 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 overpopulation 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. 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.
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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 currency. 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 bilTion a year, to keep- its ---economy -goi-ng-. -_ The
Russians buy sugar at a premium and sell oil at a discount. There is no way
that Cuba could play the role it does in Latin America, Africa, and the
Middle East without this cash and military support fromthe 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 establishment in the Western Hemisphere, save those of the U.S. and
Brazil.
Cuba's recent combat experience in Angola and Ethiopia, together with
its overwhelming qualitative and numerical superiority in weapons, provides
it with a particularly ominous intervention capability in the Caribbean and
Central America. This is clearly not the sole source of violence and
instability in be Caribbean Basin, but it magnifies and internationalizes
what would otherwise be local conflicts. 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 Guatemala. At the same time, the Cuban
government is providing advice, safehaven, communications, training and some
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financial support to several South American organizations. Training in Cuban
camps has been provided in the last two years to groups from a dozen Latin
American 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 effective intelligence service. We need it to help us judge the capabilities
and intentions 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.
We live today 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 shuttle 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 private sector, we
have allowed an alarming decline in productivity and hence in our ability to
compete in world markets. In the governmental secotr, we have continually
exhausted our reserves and then borrowed to cover the shortfall, compounding
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the inflationary pressure on interest rates and sapping public confidence in
the Government's ability to control expenditures.
These trends must not be allowed to continue. We can be thankful
that we have found a leader who is determined to trim the fat, revitalize
our institutions and reaffirm our will and purpose to work for peace and
freedom.
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