NEWSPAPER EDITORIAL WRITERS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80B01554R002900160001-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 25
• Document Creation Date: December 12, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 9, 2001
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: December 5, 1978
• Content Type: SPEECH

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NEWSPAPEP, EDITORIAL WRITERS
5 December 1978
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One of the ways I'm working at it is to release to you more that
can be released on the theory that when you have too much classified
information, nobody respects it. And therefore, the more you declassify,
the less you have to try to keep protected, the more people will take it
seriously. So we're putting out a couple of unclassified studies a
week; a wide range of topics--you've all heard of the energy studies
we've put out on the world energy situation, Soviet energy, Chinese
energy, international terrorism, balance of payments. Hans, what are
some others you've put out in your economic field?
A: Well we've put out an awful lot of material -~ essentially
quantitative and non-controversial and that raise~~hac~les in foreign
goverments by virtue of our making assessments that may have something
to do ,^~ stability. That's a negative indication; standard
statistical studies, basic resource analyses, not those which might
We get into embarrassment all the time. I was accused of putting
out the energy study to support the Administration's policy. It had
bee n-e wtraine~F for over a year before we did it so we didn't do the
study for the Administration, that's for sure. And a couple of weeks
ago I was pilloried for tearing down the Administration's policy in a
;. C.otA~
study on the Polish economy that we put out. ~ which supposedly was
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going to upset all the policy~nakers. And we're prepared to accept Z~.~.
sometimes we're popular, som/etimes we're unpopular. If it can he
declassified, if we think it will enhance the quality of American public
debate on issues of importance to the country, we're going to try to
publish.
It's part of an overall policy of greater openness stemming, in
part, obviously from the years of criticism that wee?had of the intelli-
gence function and of the CIA in particular. The feeling that if we
respond to you more, if we're more willing to have you come out here as
you are today--and we're very pleased that you would--that we can
hopefully restore some of the public confidence in what we consider to
be an essential American institution.
In that same connection, looking to my CIA hat, one of the first
things I did which you may possibly have heard about, if it got into the
press in your part of the country, was to reduce the bloated bureaucracy
b_y 820 positions here which was greeted with mixed applause by the media
o~ the country, many of whom in the liberal side were anxious that we
not get rid of all these fine old spys they've been cheering from the
sidelines for all these years. But we had too many people on hand,
there was never any disagreement that there were too many here but those
who had to leave weren't very happy with the prospect.
Out of it we are also, in the Agency today, developing a new and
more modern and more uniform equitable personnel management system.
This has been a family corporation, we're now turning it int ~ equiva-
lent of a public corporation in a sense of trying to establish much
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.,,..r
better career planning and management fortiemployees. And all of this,
the reductions, the better personnel management is, I think, one of the
things that is helping turn the morale around. It's particularly the
younger people that are appreciating the cleaning off, not deadwood, but
excess wood at the top is opening up clearer opportunities. I'm persuaded
that if I don't do something to try to ensure we have the same attractive-
ness to American youth in 1988 as we've had in 1968 and 1978, we're not
going to have a CIA of the future. And we were, frankly, bottlenecked,
stymied by too many senior people around. We're trying to make a
reasonable career prospect for the kind of people who are coming into
this Agency in their late 20s, in particular, and we hope staying with
us for the future. The morale is turning around in my opinion. In part
because of things we're doing here but, in part, because I sense ~ ~~
trend in the public, in the media, on the Hill, of a recognition you can
only go so far in criticizing of activity like this before you are going
to drive it into disuse. The people who have made a career out here
clearly were discouraged at the three plus years of very strong criticism.
I know that because I felt the same thing when the military took their
lumps in Vietnam. But the military morale has come back. First because
they've got good people and, secondly, because they've got an important
mission and they sense that. And I don't think you see that in the
military today like five--seven years ago, a young military officer
wouldn't even wear his uniform out on the street from his ship, when he
got to the base, and back and forth.
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Same thing, I think, happened here in the wake of the criticisms and
the disclosures--many of them exaggerated. But again, we've got excellent
people, there are outstanding people here and we've got a very important
mission and that, I think, is bringing it back around also.
And finally, I would have one last comment. If there is one revolu-
tionary thing going on around here it's the development of an external
oversight process involving not only the Executive Branch but the
Legislative Branch of our country and its government. I think this is
probably the first time in the history of any major intelligence organiza-
tion that there really has been an effective external oversight process
applied. It's working well and in the last year, year and a half, we've
made great progress in working with the Congressional oversight committees.
We have a good, but distant and oversight relationship--not a clubby
relationship--with them but a good working relationship. It's going to
take another two or three years to see if we can find the right balance
in this oversight process between so much oversight that we don't have
good intelligence because there are too many leaks or we get too timid,
and that we don't have enough oversight that the public can be reassured
and that we are held accountable.
--. _.
Because the real value of the oversight to us, to me, is the
accountability. If you are going to have the kinds of responsibility
that we do have and the kinds of authority that we have out here, I
think there are really positive values in being accountable and learning
to be just that little bit more judicious because you know you're going
to have to account for the decisions you make. That hasn't existed much
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before. It's still, I would say, in what you might call the experimental
stages. I think we are moving very much in the right direction but it is
going to take more time before we settle out and see that it really will
give us the assurances the country wants and yet allow us the latitude,
the freedom to do the job that has to be done.
Well, the President seems to be somewhat dissatisfied with the degree
of political intelligence he's been getting on some issues. Could you
discuss that a little bit?
A: Sure. The most difficult part of intelligence analysis is predicting
political events. In military intelligence you've at least got
some hardware to count. In economic intelligence you've got some
beans to count or some statistics to work with. Predicting political
events, particularly revolutions, development of strong opposition
as we've had in Iran, coups, that kind of thing, is the toughest
challenge we've got. Sometimes we make it, sometimes we don't. I
never will predict that we'll make them all. I'll never be satisfied
unless we do. I'm delighted that the President is interested and
concerned enough about his intelligence support that he expressed an
interest here in trying to see how he could help us improve this
type of predicting for the future, particularly by bringing the
National Security Council, the State Department, and the Intelligence
Community into even closer teamwork on this. And out of his interest
and support here, we hope we'll do better in the future.
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To put the same question a little more directly and simply, did you
screw up in Iran?
Q: The President indicates that he didn't get the sort of intelligence
he has the right to expect.
A: Well you may know the President better than I do and you may have
read his message better than I do, but I didn't read that in his
message. Did you? Did you have access to it?
Maybe I read between the lines.
A: The word Iran isn't in his note to me.
Q: The timing left that impression. Did you mislead the President
in any way?
0: Did you fail to inform him in any way? This policy, I mean did this
event come about in any way because of a situation like Iran.?
A: No, that policy has been here for the 21 months I've been here. I
started that at the very beginning.
Q
special problem~on a case like Iran where you have
a friendly government you are trying to maintain some kind of
contact with the possible dissenting element without disturbing the
regime too much. Is that a serious problem?
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A: Yes, it's a very difficult problem because if you get caught spying
on the Russians, nobody is terribly unhappy. If you get caught
spying on the British, we are terribly embarrassed and we wouldn't
spy on the British, you know, they're our very close allie~and
friends. So the extent that you have contact with dissident elements
in a friendly country, you can be misinterpreted as trying to
subvert the regime and so on. But I'm not trying to make excuses.
We could have done better in Iran but I'm saying to you that if the
things that the Intelligence Community misses over along period of
time are these eruptions that come up--coups, assassinations, dis-
orders, surprise results of democratic elections--yes, we're not
happy. But the principal job is to be sure the decisor~makers have
the long-range thrust of what is going onj things to which they can
really respond.
Q: In view of your policy of openness with the press, I find it a little
surprising that your Iran desk person is not here today. We've got
the Far East something or other and somebody else, but we don't have
anyone who answers for Iran. Was that deliberate on your part or
does that mean hat person is no longer occupying that particular desk?
A: Among other things we're very thin on Iran, which is one of our
problems. We're very thin on the expertise that was most
here, the sociological, political expertise.
Q: Admiral Turner, you deserve a little help.
tried awfully
hard to get me to say who did we want to talk to today and I don't
think I said anything about Iran. Did I?
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A: eJe're in the midst of a very tense week in Iran and I can't spare
people.
Q: Admiral, to put this on a somewhat more positive note, are you
at liberty to tell us who "the enemy is?"
A: Yes, let me give you my synopsis of it. The Shah has been--
you're saying the enemy of the Shah, the opponents of the Shah,
the opponents of the existing regime? He's been trying to liberalize,
democratize his country in a gradual way and he is beset by the
right wing religious extremists who feel that he has contravened the
laws of Islam. He is beset by the left wing Tuda Communist party,
who ~f-~w~e~their own opposition to any regime of a non-Communist
nature. And in between the two, there must be a wide spectrum of
people who, for very different views, have issue with the Shah and
his regime--intellectuals, businessmen who have had their lot
improved considerably but don't feel they've been given enough voice
in the government, and I think those range in all kinds of gradations.
It's a very interesting situation and one of the reasons it's
difficult to have predicted, is that there is not a real cohesive
opposition--you can't put your finger on a group of people who are
sitting there in charge of this.
C: Admiral, we're asking you.
A: I think what coalesced it and where we, you, the academics, ~n I
don't know who went around the world predicting this eruption. I
should have done it better than anybody else, I'm not trying to pass
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the blame. I'm just saying that I'm not the only guy that didn't
say on such and such a date this thing was going to erupt. I should
have, but where we missed it, in my view, is underestimating the
strength of the Moslem revival here~,cause it's been engendered in
recent years. And I think that was the coalescing element, not a
bunch of Moslem people or religious leaders, but the fervor of
renewed enthusiasm for their religion, a feeling that maybe Mecca
was really becoming the center of the world again because of the
greatly increased position and strength of that part of the world.
And that around this fervor coalesced these various other dissident
elements, but not with some individual as the leader of the whole
thing. That's why it's hard for the Shah today to grapple with the
problemN to some extent because, you know, where does he go to say
well, I'll change in these ways and let's try to do something
different.
(Inaudible)
A: Well that's what all my detractors say, but that's not the case
at all. There's nothing that we have done to reduce the human
intelligence effort applicable to this situation. In fact, in my
opinion, in the year and a half I've been here we've strengthened
the human intelligence capabilities, not weakened it. Taking 820
unnecessary people out of a system doesn't weaken it unless you're
one of the 820 and believe you're so good that you can't be spared.
Why? Because if you've got people who are underemployed and over-
supervised, it doesn't help your productivity. You don't write
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better stories if you've got more people kibitzing your product do
you? And that's what we had here. Excuse me, one last thing; the
reductions were in headquarters. So we didn't take any people out
of Iran or other countries.
Q: Are you saying that the facts ~ the data from which someone could
have devined that something was about to happen in Iran were avail-
able to the CIA but the analysis was inadequate?
A: Well, you never have all the data you would like or, in retrospect,
could have had, but I think most of the data ~ was available in
the open categories, you know, to you as much as to me in this
case.
Q: We smelled the tear gas down at the White House when the Shah was
here--there was nothing classified about it.
Well, I think there's another point here too, but one of the stories
"~~~j
that I read suggested that bankers, for example, were telling for
several months before this occurred that they had asked ~~ ,~?
t~ ~~~L~j _,~,,~~ ~ money out of the country and you'd think this
would be a pretty good sign that this was far more serious than
merel ust a bunch of ' ~?~ n o ~ ~ ~rtCa~" ?see those re orts
Y j l~~*.Ct~di ~. (_ td~Ln~~ ~G~ ~ p
there and that it was not that difficult to get--the bankers got it
and the CIA didn't and I just wondered how you handle, or what your
response is to that suggestion.
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A: Well now, first of all, you jump to a big conclusion there. You say
the CIA didn't get it.
I didn't jump to a conclusion, Admiral, what I'm saying to you is
what I read in wire service reports that were gathered by reporters
who were in various parts of the world.
A: Well, but if you didn't jump to a conclusion, the wire service jumped
to a conclusion of knowing what's going on inside the CIA. And I
deny that either you or the wire service have that access and you're
jumping to a conclusion there. Now, yeah we were aware of this
weren't we? Yes.
The world of collection is full of secrets~~~?~~r,,~~~,~;ti(;1~''~id~~~~ra=f':
We get bankers' assessments of
;tf,~the most i ncredi bl e
countries, the most stable countries in the world where, for one
reason or another having to do with exchange rate problems, with
temporary difficulties in balance of the payments such as we had in
Mexico during the ~~~,,,,~~~~,~ changes of massive capital
flights. Do we interpret that as being the imminent collapse of a
regime? Of course not. Iran was a special situation which was
extremely difficult to assess because you had there, over a period
of years, a massive displacement of highly structured rural poor
into the urban areas where all of the modernization was going on and
they became disoriented. They were not received into a community in
the urban areas and they were fair game for rabble-rousing, and it's
very difficult to communicate with those people for anybody, and I
must point to the outstanding example of a person who misread the
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signals. It wasn't somebody in the CIA but it was the Shah, and he
was well-advised by people who supposedly knew what was going
A: And the other people who are as much surprised as anybody were the
so-called opposition leaders. I really don't think they thought
they were going to succeed to the degree they did. And, you know,
we're almost trying to paint a black and white picture here like
the CIA was saying to the President, for Heaven's sakes, there's not
a thing wrong in Iran, on the one hand; on the other hand you are
saying, why didn't we predict the date on which this eruption was
going to take place.
It seems to me the point involved here that we all seem to be taking
-L -~ for granted and that is that had the CIA made a better
analysis, presumably something would have been done about it. My
question to you, Admiral, is even if you had assessed the situation
correctly, what would we have done about it?
A: Well, I'm not a policy~naker and I have to foreswear that business
because otherwise my analyses look tainted. But I'm hardstretched
to think there was much we could have done to have changed this
trend of events.
Q: We'd of assassinated a few priests, or whatever they call~~~,,r ?
A: Well you say we, I can only assure you I have an Executive Order
that prohibits my thinking about that let alone doing it. So, no,
we wouldn't have.
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1 ~ ~
That's just as much a part of my prohibition as doing it ourselves.
But that's why I made the point earlier that the most important part
of intelligence is being sure you are keeping the decisio-~makers
w
,~
abreast of the trends that are happening because they1 react to
those.
Q: Admiral, is that the mission of the CIA to inform the decisior~makers?
A: Oh yes.
Q: Admiral, if I may get this a little less particular and somewhat
more general just for a second, hat is the primary mission of the
CIA. Are covert operations also a part of the activity, if they
are not now?
A: They are now.
Q: You have made a distinction with regard to different kinds of
.~~~~~,=
information gathering political, economic. Would you make a
~L'v~
distinction between.f~_information gathering mission and the covert
political mission?
A.: Covert political action is the effort to influence events in a
foreign country without it being known who was doing the influencing.
It is not an intelligence function, which is collecting information
and analyzing information and producing evaluations for decisior~makers.
Since 1947 no President has assigned covert political action to any
agency other than the Central Intelligence Agency for execution.
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So we have had that responsibility, we still have it, it's today
under much tighter wraps than ever before. To~rit, before we can
conduct a covert political action the National Security Council must
review it, the President must sign that it is in the national
interest, and I must notify up to eight committees of the Congress
that we're doing it. The chances of this happening without it being
in conformance with U.S. policy is slim. In short, it's not our job
to think these u and to 0 off and do them. It's m ~'
p g y job ~~ we re
having a policy session to be prepared, if asked, to offer what
could be done in a covert political action mode to assist the policy
that is being derived. And, if so, I'll say this is what we could
do and the National Security Council will say, we think that's a
good idea and make its recommendation to the President who will then
sign a directive to me to do it.
What's your roleJin conjunction with this in regard to the SALT
negotiations and can you give us some evaluation of how the tentative
agreement is going to affect the strategic balance?
A: My principal role in SALT is with respect to the verification of the
terms agreed. And, in the process of developing our SALT position,
I have been very regularly consulted and in each event I give the
polic~akers my evaluation of how well we can check on this provision
if it's agreed and negotiated. There's nothing can be checked 100
percent certain so I have to give them an estimate of the probability
we would detect any violation of this agreement. They then have to
go ahead and negotiate and decide what's in the national interest
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&~
here, how much assurance~~they have to have to feel comfortable. I
also try to estimate for them what are the dangers on the overall
balance of a violation, so they can weigh that. I give them the
risk factor if there is a deliberate attempt to violate this agreement,
u"-t*3~
both in terms of the probability they'll get away with it,rdl' the
damage will do to the military balance. I'll testify on this, I am
sure, before the Congress in great detail, obviously in a classified
session, when the time comes. But that's our role, it's not to
decide whether it's a good SALT agreement or a bad SALT agreement.
Q: Could you break down for us how far down this list of probability
alt you come when you said nothing is 100 percent certain? How far
down the scale do you come in regard to verification of violations
under the SALT agreement as we know it today?
A: No I can't tell you.
Q: Have you told them?
A: Oh, I've told the decisior~makers in excruciating detail for each
provision.
You don't think that the public, in view of this new policy of
openness on the part of the CIA and all of the government, should
not be made aware of what it's intelligence agency feels about
anything as important as the SALT agreement?
A: I think that to disclose how well we could check on each of these
provisions of the SALT agreement would be handing too much to the
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other side on a silver platter. It's a very highly technical, very
highly classified means of obtaining this information. The Soviets
have their own man named Andropov, who is doing the same thing on
their side. They undoubtedly come to different conclusions because
they have different means of obtaining information and I don't want
them comparing their evaluations with mine and drawing conclusions
as to how we get our information because then they may shut it off
and my evaluations will plummet from A to E.
But ratification of SALT II, if there is a SALT II, is going to
depend rather heavily on public credulence of the verification.
A: No it isn't. Well, yes, indirectly it's going to depend on a hundred
spot if their constituents all say no and they're persuaded by
all the evidence they get that it's yes and they can't disclose that
information to the public, but that's the same thing they do when
they vote on a B-1 bomber or a missile system or anything else. So
they've got a problem, I agree, but I don't think we can go public
with the details of how we verify these things.
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Q: And that problem will be largely technical. I mean, exclusively
technical in terms of intelligence collection data?
A: Well you can always hope that you get, as your friend on your
left said, human intelligence on these too. But, you know, we talk
about national technical means as the verification technique and you
want to apply all the human intelligence you can but you don't want
to count on it because it comes and goes. You want to have a system
that is more certain.
We've been living under a SALT agreement for, what, 6 years now,
and I wonder whether the provisions in the new agreement, whether
there's a difference in kind between the verification problems
we had under SALT I from the verification problems ... could you
describe the differences , ~,,,, ~,,cti ?
Yes. They're more qualitative considerations. We're talking about
an agreement that hasn't been signed yet. But you've seen it in the
press, many of the proposed terms and I can't enunciate for you
which ones are which of course none of them are fully
agreed. But there are more qualitative things here, are you develop-
ing a new type of missile.
Q: You mean the testing, the modernization?
A: Yes, like modernization is not in the old one. It's amore numerical
counting in the old agreement plus here there are things like range
estimates and things like that that didn't exist before.
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Q: Most of those are, if I'm not mistaken, this of course is
most of provisions would be the protocol
rather than the treaty. The treaty would count just
like SALT I
A: Yes, I think there ..... (tape turned)
Q: ......... was the CIA caught napping on
A: No.
Q: Did you give the President the first intelligence on this ?
A: Yes.
0: How long had they been in before you became aware of ?
A: A few days.
Q: A few days, is that all?
A: Avery short time.
Q: Do you, yourself, feel these we'll worry about
A: That's a policy issue, I don't want to make an evaluative judgment.
I'm here to tell you whether they're there or not, who they are and
what they are.
Q: Do you make an evaluation whether they're offensive or defensive
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A: Well I'm a military man and I don't happen to believe there's much
of a distinction between offensive and defensive between you and me,
but I do tell the decisio~maker what the characteristics of the
vehicles are and that's my job. They can judge whether they want
to call them offensive or defensive but I've never, as a matter of
terminology, felt that was a very useful military distinction.
There are very few situations where anything so-called defensive
can't have an offensive application. Nuclear armament?
Q: The MIG-23 has that capability doesn't it?
A: I think I have to stand on the President's public statement on that
that we have no evidence of a nuclear capability in Cuba at this
time.
Q: On the larger question of Soviet intelligence generally, without
depending on the FBI, is there a sense of ebb and flow of it as
detente comes and goes or is it sort of a constant reflexive thing
that they just naturally spy? What sort of feeling does one have
Cl~~lu:~f~~L~~'t~'~2 compared to other days, other times?
A. Well I see no indication that detente has led to any ebbing.
In fact, I've said a number of times that while I think detente is a
net plus, that's a personal opinion not an intelligence officer's
assessment--from an intelligence officer's point of view it's a net
minus. That is, they have more opportunities to spy derivative from
detente than do we, it's a asymmetrical situation. The Director of
the FBI said that in October alone a hundred KGB agents about came
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to this country. And, again, I'm not talking anti-detente because
there are many other factors besides intelligence with which you
weigh the value of detente. But, they have increased their human
intelligence activities against us with the opportunities available
to them to visit our country or meet with our citizens through many
of the avenues opened up through detente.
Q:
Admiral, if I may, covert action operations
question I asked you. At what point was this new system launched?
A:
In 1974 the Hughes-Ryan--Mr. Ryan late of Guyana--Amendment was
passed by the Congress requiring that we notify the appropriate
committees of the Congress which have now increased to eight.
It's
an interesting point but I think that the other provisions that the
President sign this and it be approved by the National Security
Council came in February of '76 in an Executive Order that President
Ford signed. But I would have to have that checked. But '74 is the
basic threshold here.
It's not to dispute it but, seriously, how covert can anything be
A: Not much if there's not pretty good agreement on it. If the commit-
tees of the Congress really are convinced that this is in the
national interest, they are just as good at keeping secrets as
anybody. Your danger comes when it's highly inflammatory and
controversial and you want to take some initiative here.
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Doesn't that have a substantial chilling effect on the initiatives
of the Agency?
A: In the covert political action field, yes. But I also happen to
feel that the opportunities for useful employment of covert action
are much less today than they were in the past.
Why is that--besides domestic political ?
A: Yes--no. Setting that aside, if it were guaranteed covert. A
typical covert action is to provide financial and advisory support
to democratic politicians in a country where they're running against
a strongly supported Communist opposition--externally supported
Communist opposition. Today many democratic politicians would be
reluctant to take CIA money for fear if they got exposed in their
own country, they would be a net political minus rather than a plus
for lots of reasons. Secondly, the world is so much more open, the
communications are so much greater today. Who knew what was going
on in Guatamala when the CIA acted down there in--when was it--'S4,
or even in Iran in '52. Whereas today, it's just a much bigger
fishbowl that we live in. There are lesser opportunities to exert
the kind of influence that has been exerted in the past in some of
these areas. But I feel very strongly we must keep a covert action
capability in being. I don't know what the climate will be in this
country or in the world in three, four, or five years and I don't
want to be like the ladies with the lamp who found they didn't have
any oil when the time came.
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Q: You said before your biggest problem was keeping classified documents
away from us. What's your second biggest problem?
Q: What about recruitment?
A: No recruitment is not a problem. That's very interesting. We're
very pleased that even through the heighth of public criticism
of the Agency recruitment did not drop. And recruitment is high
today and as far as we can tell the quality is good. There are
particular areas of problems, there are so many more women who are
conducting a profession with as much overseas activity as we have,
we have sometimes a problem in finding a compatible husband/wife
team assighment. And it is getting more difficult for us to find
people willing to take the overseas assignments--that is just one
reason. Also, I think ....
Q: Are you suffering for cover, the lack of cover with restrictions
on
A: Yes.
Q: What was that second biggest problem?
second or third biggest problem ?
A: Well it's getting a straight story out of the press. I read about
myself so often that I know that their stories aren't straight.
Q: Is it still a policy of the CIA to lie
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A.: I don't believe it is and I've assured the Congress that when I
testify to them there are no lies.
One last question. hot spot in South America. Do
you view the dissent as any Communist threat
in that country? How do you decide ....
A: Well any sense of instability that's sort of disorganized as that
is can lead to Communist problems. I don't see the
as being controlled by the Communists at this point, but you have to
have some concern when there's a lot of turbulence. Who knows what
will evolve from it before you're finished.
I enjoyed your questions. They're penetrating and good and we like
to feel that exchanges like this will help you to understand us, the
problems we've got and the importance of what we're trying to do for the
country. And I hope and assume your question on whether we're telling
you the truth is factitious, because I've never lied in my life and I'm
not going to find myself in any job working for our fine government that
requires me to lie. It's not necessary and one thing we've been trying
to establish with Herb's office here, with this greater openness,
willingness to go out and be seen in the public, is that what we have as
a role for our country is a very honorable, very necessary and important
one. It's not a perfect world. If it were and everybody exchanged all
the data we need, we wouldn't have to look behind people's backs. But
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it isn't that kind of world and we're here to get the information in a
reasonable manner that the country needs in order to conduct a foreign
political, military and economic policy. It's my view that having good
information today so we don't confront the great wheat steals of 1972
and that kind of thing were just a plain lack of economic data, did you
and me out of a lot of money in our own pocketbooks, is much more
critical to our country perhaps than it's been in the past. When we're
in a situation of near military parity the leverage of good military
information is a lot better, a lot more important than it was when we
were vastly superior. When most countries followed our political cues
we didn't need as good information about them as when we're truly
negotiating with even small and independent and activist countries. So,
we're excited about the role we have to play for our country and appre-
ciate your willingness to come out here today and help share it with us
and understand it with us. Thank you.
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A INDEX NDEX
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