ADMIRAL TURNER`S ADDRESS AT HAMPDEN-SYDNEY COLLEGE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00498R000200080005-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 17
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 29, 2007
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: April 20, 1978
• Content Type: REPORT

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L. I
I ADMIRAL TURNERA' S ADDRESS AT HAMP.DEN.-_SY_DN.E.Y-,_.COLLEGE._
LI
HAMPDEN-SYDNEY, VIRGINIA - 20 APRIL 1978
Introductory remarks by Josiah Bunting
Admiral Turner has been the Director of Central Intelligence
Agency and the head of the Intelligence Community for the past 13 months.
The selection of President Carter is widely approved--perhaps most
adamantly of all the President's appointments. In taking over the CIA,
Admiral Turner has shown himself as perhaps the most dominating of all
the Directors of the organization. He has grabbed the levers firmly and
must rearrange them to suit his sense of organizational tidiness and
efficiency and has taken some heat in the process. This has not raised
his pulse a half a beat I assure you. Admiral Turner's education is
Amherst College, Annapolis, Oxford and Harvard Universities. He achieved
great academic distinction at all these institutions. At Annapolis he
was Brigade Commander and graduated near the head of his class. He
started on the Academy football team for three years.
Latterly, he has held a variety of assignments in the naval
every student to read Thucydides, Mahan, Corbet, Burke, Clausewitz--
and strategy. He threw out the books of the jargon-mongers; he required
postgraduate program for senior officers, loosed on the students a heavy
and rich burden of assignments in reading and writing operational analysis
This was an act of bureaucratic courage for which I would like to thank
him publicly. In two years he turned the War College into a demanding,
just after I published a book critical of American policy in Vietnam.
September of 1975, was made Commander in Chief, Allied Forces Southern
Europe. Admiral Turner, when he was the President of the Naval War
College in 1972, appointed me to the professorship of military strategy
service. He has commanded ships, planning groups, fleets and finally in
classical strategists and writers.
and make the officers work harder than they had ever worked.
the curriculum and replace them with The Peloponnesian Wars by Thucydides
nice thing to be called if you were an admiral in 1972. What a strange
definition of liberalism it was to throw the books by Fullbright out of
ironic that he was then seen as what we called a liberal reformist--not a
was enormously successful and outraged a number of older admirals. It was
or gentility. He was to set the War College on fire with excellence. He
sail, play golf and be gentile. Admiral Turner was not interested in golf
A year's course as a student at the War College had been a quiet
interlude between assignments for naval officers; a chance for them to
Admiral Turner's commitment to excellence is a probable and
enspiriting thing. Excellence of mind, excellence of character, commitment
to patriotic public service. These are qualities which are too often in
C/'
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short supply in government. What was it the Great Burke said of dissent?
"Dissent, most-unpopular but most necessary." As well, are might say, as
the qualities of mind and character Admiral Turner has brought to his
work: fresh ideas and commitment to the ascendancy of reason; most
unpopular among bureaucrats but most needed by citizens.
/ Thank you very much, thank you President Bunting. You know it's
always very stimulating to be back in an academic atmosphere and
particularly so when it's got anything to do with Josiah Bunting. When
Si joined us at the Naval War College in 1972, it was maybe 48 hours
before he started having a leavening effect on the military meal up there.
I can remember that it was maybe two weeks that he was there when he came
to me and sort of glanced at me and said,"Stan, Vietnam is still going
on, and there's a real problem between the military and the media. They
don't understand each other and there are great problems here for our
country. I think we ought to have a little conference and talk about this."
I said fine, go ahead and work out something, Si. The next thing-I knew,
in a couple of months we had on the campus 50 of the top media names in
the country ranging from Roy Anderson and Seymour Hersih on the left, and
Drew Middleton and all the pro-Vietnam people on the right--and there they
were with these military officers, some of whom had just come out of the
trenches in Vietnam. We almost had a couple of fights on the stage, but
it was very exciting, it was very profitable. And out of it there have
been five subsequent conferences and it's still going on because everybody
has found it so valuable. When you get each side to recognize that it had
special responsibilities, special responsibilities to the others, the
military and the media and vice versa, but mainly special responsibilities
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to the American public. Out of it, I gained a very strong feeling--and it
was really by your President's action--that all of us in public life do have
a clear responsibility through the media to keep the American public as
well informed as we can about what we are doing.
This morning, for instance, I was reminded of all these things
I've just been discussing with you, because I was testifying before the
House of Representatives in the Congress of our country. I was testifying
to them on a policy that I've instituted in the Central Intelligence
Agency and our intelligence community in general, over the past year--a
policy of much greater openness with the public. I know you would recognize
that intelligence historically has operated under a rule of maximum secrecy
and minimum disclosure and there have been lots of reasons for that in
the past. It hasn't been a bad policy. I happen to think it is
inappropriate for the United States at this time. We are building what I
call a new American model of intelligence, one identification of which is
a policy of greater openness. We are speaking more, like tonight. We are
answering the telephone more when the media phone, giving them better and
more complete answers; and we're publishing more. We haven't quite come
to the publish and perish or perish and publish, whatever it is, but what
we do today is when we write an estimate of some situation around the
world, write a study on some important topic of interest to our country, we
look it over very carefully--because it's almost always classified. We ask
ourselves, if we take out of it those elements that we cannot afford to
let be known in public, will it still be of value to the American public;
will it still enhance the quality of American debate on this issue. If it
will, if there is enough substance left, we go ahead and publish it. We
have done an average of two of these a week over the past year. We hope
they have been of value to the American public. We think they have, we
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think they have shown the taxpayer something of a return on his dollars
and we think they have at least aired some of the important points and
issues of concerns for all of us.
There are problems with this policy of greater openness, because
we can't control the source of the information and sometimes we get caught
because we tell as much as we can but we can't follow through and tell
everything. If we tell how we got our information, we may never get it
again. If we tell things that are of unique value to our policy makers,
they may lose those unique advantages which they have. It does cause problems.
For instance, if we are falsely accused of having done something and we
deny it, what do we say the next day when somebody asks us did you do thus
and so, which in fact we did do quite properly, but which we simply cannot
talk about without risking people's lives or risking whether we can ever
do it again in the interest of our country. So, sometimes we cannot even
defend ourselves in public. Sometimes we can tell enough to be truthful,
enough to be helpful, but not always quite enough to be fully convincing.
The other day I made a statement the press has not yet released. There
had been a story in a book by a man named Epstein about spies and counter-
spies, and one little incident mentioned was about a man named Nosenko,
who defected in the 1960s from the Soviet Union to the United States.
There are those who say he really wasn't a defector, he was what we call
a double agent. That is, he came over here, took asylum, became an
American citizen, told us a lot of interesting things about the Soviet Union,
but really he was working for the Soviet Union. He was telling us things
they wanted us to know, some people contend. Well, I checked that out,
we've checked that out over these years and we have every reason to believe
this man is a genuine defector. He has been very helpful to our country.
Yet, we can't quite say enough detail to persuade the American media, many
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of whom still question it. It's difficult, because if I tell too much
more it may endanger other people, other activities.
Similarly, last summer I found that we had some documents on
drug experimentation done by the Central Intelligence Agency a dozen or
more years ago. I released them to the public and to Congress--all except
the names of some of the individuals with whom we had contracts to do this
research. We released those. Why? Because when we made those contracts
the agreement was they would be private. I can't look back 20 years and
renege on a promise that was made. What kind of a contract is this? What
kind of loyalties do we have to people who have done good and honest work
for us? So, then I get pilloried in the press when I release almost
everything. We even have lawsuits about why we didn't tell them the rest.
So there are problems with this, but on balance, being more open pays off.
Sometimes we get the short end of the stick because we can't follow through
as completely as we would like to or as the public would like us to.
The policy of oppenness has another side to it also because we
do have a real problem in our country today of too much information
getting out. There are those who are concerned that a policy of openness
will lead to unnecessary, dangerous levels of disclosure. Obviously, I
don't happen to think so. One of the biggest problems we have with
security of information today is that there is too much classified infor-
mation in our government system. Too many things are marked secret, or
top secret, or destroy before reading, whatever it may be. Well, what I
hope is that by declassifying and publishing as much of that as we can we
garner greater respect for that which is left. The problem today is a
lack of respect. You see it in the unauthorized, improper publications,
books and articles and speeches and so on by former intelligence officers,
by average citizens who snoop around, of information that really should be
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kept in the classified channel. I would submit to you that I think we've
gone a bit too far in the nation in praising these so-called whistle-blower
type people and assuming that when they make a revelation about something
that we think should have been classified, assuming that they're a hero
and we're the bad guys and that the only reason we would want them not to
publish is to hide something. I think the time has come in this country
to begin to place some modicum of trust in the elected and appointed
public officials and not at least start from the assumption that we all
have bad motives.
I'm not just asking that you take us on our trust, because I
think a second quality of this new model of American intelligence that I
would like to emphasize to you; the second change that has come over the
way we go about conducting intelligence in this country is what I call
greater oversight. A complement to the greater openness. Now, bear in
mind that I said we can't tell everything. Clearly, you cannot have full
public oversight of everything that we do. Instead, out of these recent
years of intense criticism of our intelligence community, some of it
justified some of it not; we have formed a new program of oversight. I
call it surrogate public oversight. These are surrogates for the public
who cannot see everything. Now, I'm not using that word surrogate like
Masters and Johnson in their sexual therapy, but substitutes for the
public. Who are they? Well first, the President and the Vice President,
who today take a very keen interest and are very abreast of our intelligence
activities. Next, something known as an Intelligence Oversight Board was
created two years ago: three distinguished Americans appointed by the
President, reporting only to the President and only to look after or check
on the legality and propriety of what we are doing in the world of intelli-
gence. If you, my employees, anyone in this country wants to complain, if
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they think something is being done improperly in the intelligence world,
they write to the Intelligence Board who investigates it, reports only to
the President--not to me, it doesn't come through me, it goes around me.
If the President finds it's improper, I'll get called on the carpet and
fired, or told to straighten it out, or whatever is appropriate. A third
surrogate for the public are two committees of the Congress, created in
the last year and a half; one in the Senate, one in the House of
Representatives--only to oversee the intelligence process. This is their
job. We've never had this before. It's always been a sub-assignment of
some other committee like the Armed Services Committee. Now it's a special
select committee in each chamber just to look at what we are doing. They
are doing a good job of that looking, they are interrogating us, they are
checking on us. At the same time they are being helpful to us, giving us
a feel for what the country wants out of its intelligence organizations.
So, it's a very helpful and healthy process but it is clearly an oversight
process.
The area in which perhaps oversight is most important and cer-
tainly the area in which we have been most criticized in recent years, has
not really been our intelligence activities but it has been what I call
our covert action or our political action activities. The distinction
being that intelligence is collecting information and analyzing it, putting
it to use. Political action is trying to influence events, or opinions, or
attitudes in other parts of the world. It is not strictly an intelligence
function, but it's one the country has assigned to the Central Intelligence
Agency to execute for the country. I'd like to say two things about
political action: first, it is much less applicable to our country's
needs today than it has been in the past. Yet we still must retain the
residual potential or capability to do these kinds of things but I don't
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we will find many instances in which it is a useful mechanism. Certainly,
that is not the case today. It is a very small part of our activity.
Secondly, even when it is applicable today, it is under much tighter
control than ever before--during the period which you've heard so much
criticism, Chile and that kind of thing, Cuba and so on. The controls are
that before we undertake political action we must obtain approval of the
National Security Council, the signature of the President of the United
States and I must notify the appropriate committees of our Congress.
Thus; you have two branches of government involved, you have quite a few
people involved, you have good checks and balances; good assurances to
the public that we are not initiating these things and running off on our
own in the world of intelligence.
Now the next most delicate area of our work is spying; particu-
larly the kind of spying that is done by the traditional, historic human
intelligence agent. People sometimes ask you, why do you need to do this
kind of thing today; first, because there are more technical means of
collecting intelligence which are a little more sanitary, a little less
risky, why don't you use those instead of the traditional human spy. What
I'd like to say simply, is that we need both. You get different kinds of
intelligence, different qualities of intelligence from each. The biggest
challenge we have perhaps today in collecting information is to try to
find the right way to bring these new technical means--photographic,
signals intercepts, and so on--together with the traditional human intelli-
gence work. We have to blend them into a machinery that's well-oiled
that's well-meshed, and works together. It hasn't been this way in the
past because these technical systems are relatively new. We are working
today very diligently to bring about the ways to ensure that the gaps you
have in technical intelligence are filled by human intelligence, or what
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you can't get by human intelligence is filled by one or another of the
technical systems. It's an exciting but challenging opportunity.
In addition, some people often ask, why should either human or
technical means be used today. Do we need to spy on other people. Why
don't we follow the old adage that gentlemen don't read each other's mail.
Well, let me answer that if I may, simply by trying to say that we must
appreciate how blessed we are that we live in the most free, the most open
society that the world has ever known. You are aware as I that the world
is all not like us, and that there are many other societies that are not
free and not open. Any foreigner who may come to our country may, in a
very short period of time by reading the newspapers, watching television,
talking to people on the street, get a real feel for our country and what
we are doing and the general direction we are going. Can you imagine
reading Pravda, or watching television, or walking down the street in
Leningrad and expecting to get that kind of an understanding of what the
Soviet Union is all about? Clearly not. Yet, you and I are affected,
very directly, by the kinds of decisions that are made and kept in secret
in many of these closed societies around the world. When closed societies
build up their military strength, we're probably going to end up increasing
our military budget and increasing your taxes and mine. If they take
precipitous, unannounced major economic moves, like entering the grain
market on a large scale, they can upset the balance of economic activity
in many areas of the world. We are more fortunate. We have a very large,
a very successful economy; we are less likely to be effected. For many of
our smaller allied friends, it could have catastrophic impact if they are
caught unaware by sudden economic moves by these closed societies.
Politically, if they make sudden unexpected political moves they
can destabilize areas of the world; areas again where we have direct
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American interests or friends and allies whom w?re want to support. So,
I'm saying to you that it's very important to us today to be able to gain
information about the attitudes, the trends, the prospects of many of
these closed societies, in order to allow our decision makers to have a
basis for making the best decisions possible for us and the free world in
general. In fact, I would suggest that it's more important today than
perhaps it has been ever since World War II that we have good political,
economic, and military intelligence on the closed societies of the world.
Thirty years ago we were the dominant military power, no one could touch
us. Today we are pretty close to military parity. Think how much more
leverage good intelligence about enemy and military capabilities and
intentions is when you are in a situation of near parity, than when you
have this great superiority. Thirty years ago we were the dominant
political power in the world. Most of the smallest nations sort of
followed our lead. Nobody does that today, everyone is independent and
doing his own thing. And that's fine. But it means that if we are going
to work in that milieu, if we're going to be the leader of the free world,
we have to understand the aspirations, the hopes, the cultures of these
other societies. We must have good intelligence. Thirty years ago, we
were a totally independent economic power. Today it's almost trite to say
we're interdependent for oil, with OPEC and that kind of thing. Today it's
much more important for us to be able to anticipate the economic moves and
economic policies of others than it ever was before when we were so dominant.
I would like to conclude by simply saying that I've found the
past year and a quarter that I've been privileged to be in this position;
that this is as exciting and intellectually demanding a profession as
there is in our country today. The challenge of how you get this informa-
tion that is deliberately withheld, that has such import all over the world;
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the challenge of when you've got that information of how you pull it
together and come to a reasonable conclusion, a reasonable analysis, that
will help our policy makers make the best decision possible for us and the
entire free world. It really is demanding, exacting and fun. I hope that
one of these days many of you will elect to serve in our government. If
you do, I hope you'll give consideration not only to the more public and
more well-known bureaus and agencies but those of the intelligence
community as well. I can assure you, you would find it very challenging.
Thank you.
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Q&A - HAMPDEN-SYDNEY COLLEGE - 20 APR 78
Q: Inaudible.
A: The question is, in exchange for asking for greater trust in the
American public are we prepared not to put out untruthful information
to the public and try to establish various positions by so doing.
Absolutely, yes. When I was testifying this morning, for instance, on
the regulation I put out last November which says that the Central Intelli-
gence Agency will have no relationship, for the purpose of collecting
intelligence, with any member of an accredited U.S. media organization.
In short, we are foregoing this valuable means of collecting intelligence
in order to insure that there is no accidental spillover of our attitudes
or our policies into the American media; into the information that is
supplied to the American public. It's a voluntary denial of an important
source of information; one we think is well worth it in order to protect
the American rights written into the Constitution.
Q: Inaudible.
A: Now that's a very good point and the regulation is very explicit on
that. We treat the American media as a public citizen like anybody else.
We say that if American media people want to help their country by providing
information that they have, that they think will be of value to their
country, we're happy to take it. Two things: it must be open and it
must be voluntary.. We must be willing to discuss the fact that you and I
met and talked about something and it must be your volunteering to me,
but I'm not, going to go to a media man and say will you go get me some
information.
Q: Do you pay for it?
A: No, we will not pay for it.
Q: Does the United States need both the CIA and the NSA now?
A: The NSA is the National Security Agency. We have even more than the
NSA and the CIA. We have the Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA; we
have the Bureau of Intelligence Research in the State Department; we have
a small intelligence unit in Treasury; there are Army, Navy and Air Force
intelligence agencies. It's a very large, complex organization. The
answer to your question is, I believe, yes. Last January President Carter
issued a new order which gives me, as the Director of Central Intelligence--
a separate job from that I have as being head of the CIA--greater authority
to coordinate the whole intelligence activity, to ensure that the NSA and
the CIA are working in close cohort. It's not too bad today, but it can
be improved and the new authorities I've been given are pointed in that
direction. I think over the next few years we are going to see a great
tightening of the intelligence community so that we do work together
without any overlapping that isn't desirable.
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Q: Admiral Turner, this afternoon you were making reference to the fact
that the CIA conducts a lot of experiments and a lot of research apart
from being a spy organization. I was wondering, does this--I would suppose
that a lot of the things that your researchers, that your scientists
discover late on, say in ten years or five years, will actually be positive
and help the United States. There are some things that have been developed
specifically in the....
[:At this point the tape was turned over and the remainder of
this question and a portion of the answer was lost.]
A: ....The research I was talking about most this afternoon is the
intellectual research of analyzing information that comes in, and trying
to find out what it says. You don't, even with a spy, get the full,
complete, exact picture--what the Soviets are going to do in Ethiopia
tomorrow. You may get a little piece of it here, a little piece of it
there. The real challenge is to take a little bit that came by one kind
of intelligence work, a little bit by another, put them together, see
which are the false pieces, which are the true and come to some kind of
picture painting that will be useful to the people who have to make
decisions.
Q: Inaudible.
A: "Turner's Law" is that the danger of leakage is geometrically proportional
to the number of people who know the secret. I'm indiscriminant as to
whether the people are congressmen, CIA people, State Department people,
ambassadors, or whoever it may be. It's a basic law that the more people
who know, the more danger you have. Let me say that in the year I have
been working with the Congress, I have really seen a great appreciation by
these intelligence committees of the responsibility that is resting on
their shoulders by telling them some of these things. I have seen very
little leaking from what I have been telling them as a result of their
responsibilities of oversight. There are much greater chances of leaks
when it involves the domestic political situation where somehow it gets
involved with a foreign policy issue--then it becomes a domestic political
one at the same time. But particularly when it comes to how we collect
our intelligence, how we do our work, I have not had serious problems in
that regard and I found the Congress very, very responsible. We are still
working out the balance of oversight, and leaks, and son and it will take
another year or two before we get really settled down with good procedures
for the Congress where we can work that out. I'm very optimistic that we
will do it in an appropriate manner.
Q: Inaudible.
A: If I was asked or had to do something contrary to my personal code of
ethics, would I quit or stay on to do what my country thought I should do?
I would do absolutely nothing illegal without quitting. I said that in
testimony before the Congress. If I was ordered to do something I thought
was illegal, I would make my position known and, if necessary, leave. When
it comes to ethics it's a much more difficult issue. I think I'm an ethical
man, I think I have my own standards. If I got in a discussion with the
President of the United States and said I thought this was improper,
and below the standards of ethics, that I think we should condone as a
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country, I would want to argue that point and see what the counter arguments
were, and then--I couldn't tell you what I would do. With illegality,
there is no question in my mind. I don't want to go to jail. I'm not
saying that as a moralist, a hero, or anything else. 'I like this country
and I'd rather see it from the outside. There are probably some ethical
things that I could be asked to do that I would balk at. I think the
answer to your question is yes, in some situations I'd have to feel not
only that it was repugnant to me personally but that it was not illegal to
do this. It's sort of like asking you to stand up in front of machine
gun fire; you never know until you get there how you are going to react.
Q: How do you compare the CIA's efficiency with the KGB or something like
that?
A: I feel sorry for some of the people in the front row here that I talked
to this afternoon because I think it's almost the same answer to that
question, but please bear with me. The KGB has many more resources,
many many more people, particularly in the human spy business. In our
country because it is so open, it is much more vulnerable than their
country in that respect, so it's more appropriate for them than us. We are
a more advanced nation in technology, we are more capable in the areas of
technical intelligence than them. Finally, I think the analytic and
research function is bound to be better in a free society. I'd hate to
come to the wrong conclusion when making some analogies to the KGB.
Q: Sir, with the growing Soviet arms build-up, why is President Carter
directing you to cut back on CIA personnel?
A: Number one, your assumption is wrong. President Carter accepted my
recommendation to cut back; it was my initiative entirely. I took it
because it has been recognized for many years in the CIA that we were
overstaffed and yet it was a difficult thing to do and it fell to me to do
it. I did it because I sincerely felt and still feel that it will improve
the capability of the Central Intelligence Agency, not hurt it. The
problem was that we were overstaffed, people were under-employed and over-
supervised and that could not either help morale or efficiency; and we
were congested at the top. I'm opening it up so that young people like
you can join us and see that there is a good career prospect ahead. You're
going to have opportunity, if you do well, to get promoted. You are not
going to get stuck behind a whole bunch of old fogies who have been there
for a long time. I want, as much as anything else, whenever I leave this
job to have a confident feeling that we are going to have just as good an
Agency in 1938 as we do in 1973. That means providing incentives, providing
career opportunities for young people who come in. Of the marvelous people
we have now, many of whom have been there for 15, 20, 25 years; we have got
to keep that same quality o. people coming in from the bottom so there will
be that same capability resident in the Agency in the decade to come.
Q: You have just returned to the note you ended with, recruiting good
people. Shortly before that note at the end of your speech you indicated
the need for insight and not merely superficial information into other
countries and their operation. Would you be willing to discuss with us a
bit further how your recruiting will facilitate that insight. I'm
particularly concerned because in the early 60s a man I knew relatively
well was recruited by the CIA for operations in the Caribbean. He had
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two major talents: the desire for money and the ability to speak Spanish.
He was remarkably close-minded about Latin American countries. Two years
after that we did some very stupid things in Algeria and I couldn't help
but remember my close-minded friend.
A: Well, that's a good question and one to which there is obviously no
simple answer. Clearly, one must generate on the college campus and a
research organization like the Central Intelligence Agency's research
wing, or an intelligence collection agency like the CIA's collecting wing,
a willingness to present divergent views and not to be cowed by people
who have closed minds. I must generate an atmosphere of willingness to
hear and listen and be sure I'm not just getting a small sample of opinions
and not be duly influenced by somebody who isn't willing to see other
aspects of an issue. I can't give you an easy formula for that but let me
just tell you that yester, by pure coincidence, I called in the chief of
our branch for analysis. I said I would like to create a new vehicle, a
new form. We're going to have a new publication, we'll give it some name,
we'll pick a few topics on which you and I know there are different views
inside this intelligence agency and publish three or four under this thin
cover--monographs of the different views on that subject. For instance,
I'll pick one, it may not be an exciting one to you but--I'm trying to find
one I can talk about. You may read a lot about technical warfare capabili-
ties in the Soviet Union and all the tanks that they made for the Egyptians
have been for their defensive capability and so on. There are different
opinions on how important that is, whether it is defensive, or whether they
expect us to use chemical warfare so they're prepared to defend against it;
or whether they're going to use chemical warfare, so maybe we will too, or
they have got to be defending against wind blowing their own chemicals back.
Now there are a lot of different theories on that. All I'm trying to say
is that I want to have some papers written: What's theory A, what's
theory B, and there may be a theory C on this particular subject. I had
a concern that maybe some of the young fellows' controversial ideas were
getting shortstopped before they got up to me and I had to find one on this
topic by nosing around. That's another way you have to operate, you have
to keep in contact not only with the vice presidents but with the sergeants
down in the troops. I recognize your problem, but I can't give you an
exact blueprint of this important issue.
Q: Inaudible.
A: In a word, are we safe or unsafe from the Soviet Union? My personal
feeling is that we are still superior to them in most areas of military
capabilities. I mean by that, that there are specific zones where they
are better than we, but overall when it comes to nuclear warfare or conven-
tional warfare, I think we are superior. I think what is happening is
that the Soviet Union has been unable to compete with us in the economic
and political spheres, and their prospects of being able to address their
shortcomings are very small. So they are instead competing in the area
where they can compete and that's the military. What they are hoping to
do, in my opinion, is not to try to overrun us, but to intimidate not only
our allies but the smaller countries around the world. Or, as they have
done in recent weeks, to use their surplus of military equipment, by
turning it over to a surrogate military force and use it to go into a
country like Ethiopia and try to gain a foothold in that part of the world.
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I think our job is to understand what level of military capability we must
maintain to be sure that we and our allies and other free nations don't
get intimidated by this emphasis on the military which the Soviets have
taken. But it's more than just who would win if we fought, it's what the
people think, what do they perceive to be the danger. If you live in
Germany, Denmark, or Belgium or somewhere where you are close to these
large conventional Soviet forces, when do you start changing your political
posture as a result of the big bully you see on the other side of the
fence. It's hard to measure, but it's my opinion there is no reason the
free world can't maintain itself in a sufficient posture that it won't
be bullied.
Q: What is your opinion of our foreign policy in Africa?
A: Intelligence officers don't get involved in policy. It's very important
that we not because if anybody has reason to believe that I am subverting
intelligence in order to support some particular policy, activist policy
in Africa, a negative policy in.Africa, or whatever it may be, then they're
going to say that that intelligence coming out of the Central Intelligence
Agency is not unbiased, is not objective. And the reason we can't at CIA,
as opposed to an NSA or State Department intelligence bureau or the Defense
Intelligence, is that the CIA is the only intelligence bureau in our
country which is not associated with making policy. So I submit to you
that it would be contravening my professional ethics if I get involved in
discussions on policy matters.
Q: Inaudible.
A: It's appointed: former Governor Scranton, a republican of Pennsylvania;
former Senator Gore, a democrat from Tennessee; and Mr. Tom Farmer, a lawyer
from Washington, D.C. All differnt types of distinguished people who
really have no axes to grind in this situation. They are people the
President chose for their competence.
Q: Inaudible.
A: In my opinion it is not Soviet motivated, it was a local affair.
....(inaudible)....
Q: Inaudible.
A: Well, one such man left the Agency--he didn't actually retire. He
wrote a book, came to me and assured me orally that he would fulfill his
agreement which he had signed when he joined the Central Intelligence
Agency, to let us check for security purposes, his book or document. He
then went ahead and published it without doing that checking. Thanks to
a good strong Attorney General in our country, we have it in court in
Alexandria, Virginia, right now for breach of contract. This court case
is going to be important because if the coutrs won't accept our secrecy
agreement as being a valid contract, we're going to have to do something
else.
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I certainly enjoyed being with you, I appreciate your courtesy
and again, I hope that you will appreciate the importance of this delicate,
difficult, but very critical activity that must go on for our country in
the kind of world we live in today. I assure you that I still do think
we are the number one intelligence agency in the world. I am dedicated to
keeping us there but doing so in ways that are going to only strengthen
our democratic institutions.
Thank you.