ADDRESS BY ADMIRAL STANSFIELD TURNER, USN, DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE NORTH SHORE UNITARIAN CHURCH CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80M00165A002500030021-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 11
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 3, 2006
• Sequence Number: 21
• Publication Date: November 13, 1977
• Content Type: TRANS

. Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80M00165AO02500030021-2
ADDRESS BY ADMIRAL STANSFIELD TURNER, USN
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
NORTH SHORE UNITARIAN CHURCH
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
13 NOVEMBER 1977
MORI/CDF,
Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80MOO165AO02500030021-2
 Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80MOO165AO02500030021-2
I'm really very pleased to be back here on the North Shore
of Chicago-land. I'm sure that all of you who live here appreciate
the privileges you have. I look back on the privilege I had of
being raised here; it has meant a lot to me ever since. I've
lived in a lot of other places across this country and around the
world, but I've never seen anywhere that I thought was better for
raising a family or putting down roots.
Speaking of roots, my professional roots when I left here
were with the United States Navy until just nine months ago when
the President of the United States uprooted me and decided that I
should become the nation's number one spook. When I came back
to Washington from my overseas assignment nine months ago to
undertake this new work, I found myself confronted with what
appeared to be a beleaguered CIA, beleaguered by several years
of criticism, investigation, adverse publicity. Yet as I began to
know the organization, I came to feel very fortunate to come to
it at this particular time in our nation's history. I felt it
was a moment of opportunity, opportunity first because I have
gotten to know the people there. I can say to you with great
confidence that I doubt that anywhere else in the business world or
in. government will you find more dedicated, more capable public
servants than in the Central Intelligence Agency and the other
associated intelligence organizations in our country. They have
an admirable record, and with this I am confident that we have the
foundation on which to rebuild public confidence which is much
deserved.
Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80M00165AO02500030021-2
 Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80MOO165AO02500030021-2
-2-
The second way it is a moment of opportunity is because I
believe that today, out of the crucible of this period of inves-
tigations and inquiry, we are forging a new model of intelligence,
uniquely an American model of intelligence. The old, the
traditional model of intelligence is one where the intelligence
organizations maintained maximum secrecy and operated with a
minimum of supervisory control. The new model that we are forging
is uniquely tailored to the outlooks, the attitudes, and the
standards of our country. On the one hand it is open, more open
just like our society. On the other hand there is more supervision,
more control, just like the checks and balances that characterize
our entire governmental process. Now let me explain to you, if I
may, a few of the cardinal features of this new American model of
intelligence.
First - openness. We are today attempting to share more with
you--the public of the United States--than perhaps ever before in
the history of our intelligence operations. We are sharing some-
thing about the process of intelligence, how we go about doing
our business. Now, clearly there are areas here we simply cannot
share or they would evaporate and go away. But on the other hand
there are lots of things about what we do that we would like people
to know more about. To know more, for instance, about the fact
that a very large percentage of our effort is not in spying. It's
not in doing clandestine things. It's in doing what would be termed
on any university campus, or in many major corporations, simply
research. We have thousands of people whose task it is to take
bits of information that we collect, sometimes openly, sometimes
clandestinely, and piece them together to make them fit into a
picture puzzle, to provide an evaluation, an estimate that will help
the decisionmakers of our country come to better decisions on behalf
of you and of me. This is a very ordinary but a very intellectually
challenging assignment. It is not spooky.
Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80MOO165AO02500030021-2
 Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80MOO165AO02500030021-2
-3-
Today, in our policy of greater openness, we are trying to
share more with you the results of this kind of analysis, this
kind of estimating. Every time we do a major intelligence study
today, we look back at it and see the label on the cover where it
may say secret, top secret, or burn before reading. Whatever it
may be, we go through it and we excise those portions which must
remain classified to protect our national interests. Then we
say to ourselves, is there enough left, is there enough substance
here to be of interest and of value and importance to the American
public. If there is, we publish it and make it available. You
may have heard in March we issued a report on the world energy
prospects for the next 10 years. In May we issued one on the world
steel outlook, whether it is over-capacity, whether it is under-
capacity. In July, on behalf of the Joint Economic Committee of
Congress, we issued one on the future prospects of the Soviet
economy, a rather startling change on what had been predicted in
the past.
Now, I will not overdo this. I don't want to let you think
we are letting all the secrets out of the bag--I'm sure you wouldn't
want us to. If we let out too much, we will lose our sources of
information--they would dry up. If we let out too much we would
deprive those decisionmakers of important advantages in having
inside information on which to base their decisions. But there are,
I believe, real advantages to us in opening up within the limits of
necessary secrecy. Interestingly, I believe it is going to make
it easier to protect our important secrets. Winston Churchill once
said if everything is classified secret, nothing is secret. We
have too much classified information today. But we also have too
many people running around who feel they can take it onto themselves
to decide what should be classified and what should be released.
They have released information which has done great damage to our
Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80MOO165AO02500030021-2
 Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80MOO165AO02500030021-2
country, So I hope that by narrowing the purpose of classified
information, by releasing as much as we possibly can without
harming our national interests, we will protect and respect that
which remains classified much more.
Sharing with the public has other advantages. I hope that
it has the advantage of giving us a better informed electorate.
What is more important to the foundation of democracy in this
country? If we, by our releasing information for which you
the taxpayers have paid, can contribute to improving the quality
of national debate on important issues, I hope we will be providing
all of you a service. And in providing that servide we derive
a benefit, we derive the benefit of staying in closer touch
with the American public. This is important to us, important
because we don't want misunderstandings. Much of the criticism
of the past was misunderstandings and we don't want those to occur
again. But also, everyone of us in authority in the intelligence
world of our country today clearly recognizes that we must operate
our intelligence mechanism in ways that are acceptable to the
ethical and moral standards of our country.
So, put youself in our shoes. It's not easy to devise
what those standards are, what we are expected to live up to, because
what the country would accept in intelligence operations or other
governmental activities twenty years ago perhaps it may not accept
today. What was condoned then may be condemned today. We have
some difficulty finding just what those standards are today and
predicting how they will look in retrospect five, ten and twenty
years from now. We have particular difficulty in our business
because we cannot go launch trial balloons. We can'.t take some
proposed secret operation and test it out on a million or so
Americans and expect it to remain secret, We either do it in a
Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80MOO165A.002500030021-2
 Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80MOO165AO02500030021-2
secret way or we just don't do it at all. That places on all of
us in the Intelligence Community a particular burden, the burden
to make difficult judgments as to what things we should and
what things we should not do.
Now the new American model that I'm speaking of establishes
controls for how these judgments are made. Let me discuss three
of those types of controls.
First I would say is self-control, or self-regulation. For
,instance, today and for some months we have been attempting to
write a specific code of ethics for the Intelligence Community.
It hasn't been easy. It hasn't been easy to write something
that is specific enough to give genuine guidance to our people,
yet not so specific as to be totally inhibiting and prevent
effectiveness. But the process of attempting to write a code
of ethics has been salutary for us, it has forced us to think
more about the ethical issues, it has forced us to wrestle with
these issues to recognize that, just as in business, just as in
other walks of government, the ethical issues are seldom all black
or all white. But we ask ourselves what standards we should set
as to the lengths we will go to obtain information for the decision-
makers of our country. We aren't really facing black and white,
clear-cut easy decisions. It would be easy for us to simply
establish a standard that says, don't ever do anything that would
embarrass the United States of America were it disclosed. Or a
standard that says, don't ever treat people of another country
differently than you would treat Americans, or a standard that says,
treat other countries as openly and as fairly as we believe in our
society that people in other countries should be treated.
Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80M00165AO02500030021-2
 Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80MOO165AO02500030021-2
But we have to remember that we are blessed because we live
in an open society. In an open society an outsider can come in
and he can get a good feel, a good grasp of what's going on, what
our basic purposes are, the directions we are going, and what the
thinking of the people is. He comes; he reads; he looks; he talks
to the people; he walks down the street; and he makes a good
appraisal of what the United States is watching.
Unfortunately, as we well know, there are closed societies
in the world today, closed societies where you don't go and walk
down the street and talk to the people,,and read newspapers which
are not very informative. Yet, we have genuine need of knowing
what's going on in many of those closed societies. Would you want
us today, your government, to be out there negotiating a new strategic
arms limitation agreement with the Soviet Union, if I could not assure
you that I thought we had some chance of feeling the pulse of the
Soviet Union's political, economic and military intentions, some
chance of understanding whether they are adhering to the terms we
will establish with them at the next SALT agreement?
And the problem is not limited to military things. Today we
are in a world of growing economic interdependence. What happens
in the economy of the Soviet Union or the United States has ripple
effects across the world horizons. Yet, even here closed societies
of the Communist Bloc are not very informative about their economic
undertakings. And each one of us here, in this room, is exposed to
dangers to our economy, to our pocketbooks, to our taxes, as a result
of actions of these other countries that are unexpected and unanticipated.
So.again I believe we must have some intelligence capabilities for
anticipating those events, for getting a feel for the directions they
are going in their economy. But this is not easy, it's not clear-cut
as to how much of that information is of real value, to what extremes,
to what limits we should go in obtaining it. So we have arrived at more
controls than the self-control I have just described.
Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80MOO165AO02500030021-2
 Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80MOO165AO02500030021-2
The second type of control is law and regulation. Congress
has passed a number of laws that affect intelligence operations.
There is, for instance, a law on wiretapping of United States
citizens' communications. On the one hand, this spring the
Administration went to the Congress with their revision to the
wiretapping law in an effort to find an even better balance in
protecting the rights of privacy of American citizens. On the
other hand, leaving open some opportunity for the government to
obtain information that may be critical to it. When needed the
President issues very specific regulations. For instance, there
is one in writing today which governs all of us in the Intelligence
Community. It says, thou shall not plan or commit assassinations.
For the next session of Congress we have worked with the Congressional
leaders on a program that will lead to what we will call charters for
intelligence. All of our intelligence operations in the CIA, in the
Defense Department, elsewhere in the government will have a specific
charter which will lay out certain do's and don't's that will
govern these operations.
And then we have the third form of control under the American
model of intelligence which I call oversight. Back at the beginning
I mentioned the difficulty we have with really giving good public
oversight and watching trial balloons about secret operations. What
has been evolving as a substitute for full public oversight, the kind
that pervades our political process and which we would like to have
but simply cannot from a practical standpoint, is what I call a
surrogate process of public oversight. One of the surrogates is the
President of the United States and another is the Vice President.
They have, since January 20th, taken a very keen interest in our
intelligence process and operations. Another surrogate is a committee
called the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence which has been in
Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80M00165AO02500030021-2
 Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80MOO165AO02500030021-2
existence for just a year and a half. Senator Adlai Stevenson of
our state is a member of that committee and I particularly enjoy
working with him. Just yesterday morning he called me with a
particular suggestion of real value to me. This committee is
a sounding board for us. We go to them with our problems and
get feedback as to what they feel the American people want.
It's a check on us. They inquire, they hear things, they read
things, they call us up and say come over and tell us what's
happening and why this is going on. It's a very valuable line
of communication between the intelligence world and the United
States representatives of the people on Capitol Hill. I'm very
pleased that in August the House of Representatives elected to
establish a corresponding oversight committee. I'm equally pleased
that your own Representative, Robert McClory, is a member of
that. I particularly enjoy working with him as well. We look
forward to having that same point of contact, the same sounding
board in the lower chamber.
Still another oversight surrogate that we have is something
called the Intelligence Oversight Board. This consists of three
distinguished citizens; ex-Governor Scranton, ex-Senator Gore and
Mr. Tom Farmer of Washington, D.C. They are appointed by the
President for the sole task of looking into the legality and propriety
of the way we are operating the Intelligence Community. You, any of
my employees, anyone who wants to, may write to the Intelligence
Oversight Board and say that fellow Turner is really messing things
up. They don't have to go through me if they work for me, they can
go right to this Board if they think there's any illegality, anything
being done improperly. The Board them makes its own investigation,
they call me in the ask me what in the world is going on, but they
do it independently and report only to the President of the United
States, and he decides if some action should be taken as a result.
Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80MOO165AO02500030021-2
 Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80MOO165AO02500030021-2
-9-
Another form of control is exercised over what we call
covert action. Let me describe very briefly what I mean by this
terminology. Covert action is not really intelligence. It is
actions taken intended to influence opinions or events in foreign
countries without anybody knowing whose point of view it is. This
is where CIA has gotten into the most adverse publicity, because it
happens that the CIA has been charged by the President over many
years as the only agency in the government that will conduct covert
action. It's outside the intelligence business, and there are not
that many cases. It's on a very, very low scale today. But today as
contrasted with the past, covert action, an effort to influence events
elsewhere in the world, that is going to be undertaken must be cleared
by the National Security Council. The President must place his
signature indicating that he wants this done, and I must then go and
notify the appropriate committees of the Congress. This is oversight.
Now there are some people that say that all of this oversight
may be overkill. Let me be candid with you--there are risks in this
process. There is the risk of timidity. There is the risk that as
you conduct more and more oversight over this intelligence operation,
you will take less and less risks, maybe too few risks for the long-term
benefit of our country. It is easy when you sit around the table with
a member of a committee and say, gee, that's too much risk, let's
not do that. It is more difficult to stand up and be counted, to say,
yes, the long-term needs of the country require that you obtain that
information. We take that risk.
There is a second'risk and that's of security leaks. As you
proliferate the number of people who have access to information about
our intelligence in order to conduct the oversight process, we run
the risk of somebody inadvertently saying something that he shouldn't
say.
Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80M00165A002500030021-2
 Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80MOO165AO02500030021-2
I believe it will be two or three years before we settle
the balance between these risks of timidity and security leaks
and the proper amount'of oversight.
In conclusion, I want you to know that I feel very confident
today that we will find a satisfactory balance in these next
two or three years as we shake down this process, as we mature to
this new American model of intelligence. I believe we will and
have developed ways of maintaining that necessary level of secrecy,
while at the same time conducting your intelligence operations only
in ways that will strengthen our open and free society.
Approved For Release 2006/08/10: CIA-RDP80M00165AO02500030021-2