FAMILY DAY AT CIA SPEECH BY STAN TURNER, THE DIRECTOR.

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80B01554R002900050001-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 7
• Document Creation Date: December 12, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 9, 2001
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: October 21, 1978
• Content Type: TRANS

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21 October 1978
Good morning everybody. I'm Stan Turner, the Director. Welcome
to our Family Day 1978. I can't tell you how pleased we are to have you
all here. I know of no Agency in the United States government that asks
more of the families of its employees than does the Central Intelligence
Agency. We are very grateful for the sacrifices and for the positive
support that all of you give to the employees of this Agency in the
course of their sensitive work. It is absolutely essential to us; we
have more family teams that help us in our work here and abroad than we
could possibly count or possibly thank. So we're grateful that you are
here today, and hope you enjoy your visit throughout our facilities.
I'd like to say that the kind of support that you give and always
have provided is maybe more important today than it has ever been,
because the intelligence function in our country, in my opinion, is more
important today than ever before. Why? Because if you just look back
ten or twenty years, we were possessed of absolute military superiority.
We were totally independent economically and we were the dominant
political force in the world. The world has changed around us since
then. We have military parity today. We talk about economic interdepen-
dence in such things as oil, raw materials and all around us, in old
countries and new countries, we have political independence and activism
on the part of other nations, not a willingness to follow our lead
necessarily. In these circumstances, certain information about what's
going on in the rest of the world is more important to our policy makers
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Intelligence Agency and the particular functions it performs in getting
and evaluating that kind of information, is enhanced as far as I can
see.
First, the Central Intelligence Agency is the primary element of
collecting what we call human intelligence, working with human beings
around the world to find out what is going on in other countries.
That's our work today, that's our speciality here, we're the best at it
in the country, we're the only real central place to focus that kind of
intelligence collection. Despite a lot of stories in the newspapers,
the human intelligence element of intelligence is more important today
than it ever has been. It's different because we do have technical
collection systems--satellites, signals intelligence, listening posts,
and so on. Those bring in vast quantities of information today. But we
need to complement each other, we need to work together, because what
you can obtain through human intelligence and what you can obtain
through technical intelligence is qualitatively different and you need
some of each. In point of fact, the more technical intelligence you
collect, the more you need human intelligence to complement it--to tell
you not, as do the technical systems, what happens or happened, but what
is going to happen, why people are doing things. So the DDO, the human
intelligence element of the Agency, is very important today as it always
has been. We do collect in the technical side through the DDS&T and
their contribution, although the DDS&T is not the nation's major technical
intelligence collection activity, it is a most important one. It is
particularly important because it provides an innovative emphasis to our
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technical collection capabilities in the country. And that's particularly
important today when these technical systems cost so very, very much
money and we need to have a competitive look at them. The DDS&T is very
important in doing that. It's also very important in ensuring that we
have the technical support for the particular kinds of activity for the
Central Intelligence Agency.
A third product of this Agency is the National Foreign Assessment
Center's studies, estimates, and evaluations. It does no good to
bring in all this information unless we do something with it and turn it
to the use and the value of our decision makers. Here the NFAC, as we
call it, is the central element and it, too, plays a unique role for our
country. It is the only analytic organization of the country that is
not subordinate to a policy maker. I'm not in the business of making
policy or recommending policy to the President. We're not supposed to
do that in the intelligence world because we're supposed to be totally
unbiased in presenting the objective facts, the objective analysis of
what is going on in the world. Once we become associated in favoring
policy A or policy B, people will, of course, suspect that our intelli-
gence is slanted to support those positions. Accordingly, since all the
other intelligence evaluating agencies--Defense, State, and Treasury--are
subordinate to policy makers, the NFAC bears a deep responsibility to
the entire government because it is the only one that can stand in a
totally unbiased position. The others attempt to I assure you, but here
we have no policy axe to grind and that contribution is just vitally
important.
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Finally, our fourth Directorate, the irec ora e mi ,
and the kind of unstinting support that it provides across a wide
range--Automatic Data Processing, to Logistics, to Communications, to
Personnel, and so on--is utterly vital to these operatins particularly
because our operations in all the other Directorates, is spread across
the world and the far-flung support elements of the DDA are utterly
critical.
Finally, just let me say to you that as we move on to the end of
1978, I have never been more optimistic about the prospects, the impor-
tance of the Central Intelligence Agency and intelligence in general in
our country than I am today. Why? Because in this year in particular,
in 1978, I think we have seen a major trend, a major reversal of attitude
toward the intelligence activities in our country. We have suffered
through over three years of intense public criticism, a small amount of
it justified but most of it not. But now we are seeing a change, a more
balanced approach, a recognition by the people of this country that they
want, they need, a good capable intelligence activity. I travel around
a fair amount, I try to talk to the public once every five or six weeks
in one form or another, and the message is very clear. The message is
coming clear on the Hill, in the Congress also. They, too, recognize
that we must retain a capability to learn what is going on in the rest
of the world and that means a secretive intelligence organization, such
as the CIA, as the central focus of that capability. In short, we
deserve, we are earning, and we are obtaining now that kind of public
and Congressional support that is essential to our future. We're not
all the way there, there is still going to be criticism and we want that
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in some sense. We don't want to be so sheltered from criticism that we
don't feel we are under an obligation to be judicious and careful and
cautious in what we do. But, at the same time, we must have that basic
support from the public, from Congress and I see us much more possessed
of it today than we have been.
But I'm also optimistic because every indication is that the
quality of our product continues to be superb and continues to be
recognized as such. We have nothing at all, we will not have the
support of the administration and the Congress and the public, or
anywhere else, if we don't do a good job, if we don't provide a useful
service. But I can assure you that regularly the President assures me
that he is pleased with our product. I can assure you that as I see
this product going to the other elements of our government, the Depart-
ment of Defense--as recently as yesterday the Secretary of Defense asked
me to do a particular study for him on a problem that he sees moving up
on the military horizon. He asked us at the Central Intelligence Agency
to make a special effort to give him some insight into that. And that
happens in the State Department, in the Treasury Department, and else-
where, and much more so today than ever before on Capitol Hill where our
product has, in my opinion, not been adequately used in years past and
is now being much more utilized, much more recognized. It can be a
factor. And as you know, we have tried in the recent year, or year and
a half, two years, to make more of our product available to the American
public in unclassified form. This has two purposes.
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One, it is to let the American public benefit by what we do, and
obtain some return on their investment, when we can do so without
jeopardizing the secrecy we must maintain. But it also has the benefit
that I believe is going to help us to maintain our secrets better. We
do have a serious problem in this country with maintaining secrets at
this particular time and it is critical to us in the intelligence world.
But one reason we don't keep is that there is too much that is classified
secret and it is not respected because of that. People see things that
are labeled secret which they recognize maybe should not be. So by
declassifying as much as we can, we hope to protect and garner respect
for that which remains. But we are in a new era, it's an exciting time,
an important time, there are changes in our procedures here because of
the publicity that we've received, the scrutiny we've received over the
last three and a half--four years. But out of this is coming, a new
intelligence capability in terms of being more open with the public
where we can, tightening security wherever possible, and at the same
time, being subject to a much greater degree of oversight by the adminis-
tration, by the Congress than ever before. But I assure you that I see
in this oversight process continuing strengths for us. It gives us a
legal, a good foundation for our activities. It gives us a sense of
responsibility, a sense of accountability, and we get support and advice
from these Congressional oversight committees which is very, very
helpful to us.
Let me just close by saying I really am optimistic. And I'm opti-
mistic more than anything else because of the quality of the people
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we're blessed to have in the Central Intelligence Agency. Their contribu-
tion, some of them going back to the beginning--1947, some of them much
more recent, have been consistently outstanding as they are today and
it's your support for them that helps to make it such. I'm grateful to
you, I'm pleased you are with us today and I hope you do enjoy your tour
of our activities here at Langley. Thank you very much.
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