OLIVER S. TURNER SOCIETY

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CIA-RDP80B01554R003000080001-4
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RIFPUB
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K
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22
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December 9, 2016
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August 1, 2001
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1
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Publication Date: 
April 16, 1979
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SPEECH
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Approved For ase 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO155 03000080001-4 LIVER S. TURNER SOCIETY Charlottesville, VA 16 April 1979 Lest any of you think I'm being too spooky, I've turned on my tape recorder here because my staff doesn't trust me. They want to know what I say. But, seriously, I know this is a private group. I do record everything I say in public. Otherwise because sometimes you get misquoted and it doesn't do you much good, but it is always reassuring to know that you were misquoted and didn't say something stupid. Actually I find that) particularly,informal discussions like this are very useful to me in crystallizing thoughts, particularly in response to questions. And sometimes I have found I was wasting my time because I would expound something and develop an idea with a newspaper reporter and then I would have to go tell my staff and we would put that in a speech, here is what I said. So now I record it and make them listen to it and say, those pearls of wisdom must now be incorporated in the party line. I don't have to go back and work at it. So excuse me if I turn this on for that purpose. First of allI want to thank all of you for the honor you have done my father in naming your society for him. And, of course, as Chuck was so kind to say, it seemed to me it was a very wonderful memorabilia for him in the sense that he had such an inquiring mind, such a desire to see all sides of an issue. It meant so much to me in my upbringing that he not only was interested in what went on in all kinds of walks of life, all kinds of affairs for our country, but he was always open in knowing that there were two sides to the story. And I think that has held me in great stead. Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO1554R003000080001-4 Approved For ease 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO155*3000080001-4 So what I wanted to do in this opportunity to be with you today is mainly to respond to your questions and try to bring out both sides of some of these issues that are before our country. But rather than sort of give you a standard speech on intelligence--which I could pull out of the file and you could read much better--I thought maybe you would enjoy hearing a few anecdotes, a few reminiscences of my experience over the past two and a quarter years in this job, and from those we could build into what is going on and you could ask your questions. Let me start way back at the beginning which was the 2nd of February 1977. I was sitting in a big Mussolini style office that the Italians gave me in my Naples command and the telephone rang. It was the newly appointed Secretary of Defense, Harold Brown, and he said, "Turner, the President would like to see you in his office tomorrow." Well it was 3:15 in the afternoon in Naples, it was only maybe 9:15 or 10:15 in Washington. Maybe he thought that was a lot of time to get to Washington but all the planes had left except the late night flight or something out of Rome. ' I had never been called to the President's office in Washington before in 31 years of service, so I was rather anxious to get there. The long and the short of it, I called in an aide and said, get me on the next plane to Washington. Then I called my two or three close advisors and said, "I want to confide in you, I'm being called to see the President tomorrow and what do you think he is going to ask me and what should I say?" So we were sitting there war gaming that and the aide came back in and said, "Admiral, there's just a chance that we can get you on the Concorde out of Paris tonight, but it is against the United Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO1554R003000080001-4 Approved For ease 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BOl 55403000080001-4 States rules to fly on a foreign flag, you have to fly in U.S. planes." I said, "Son, I just have never been called to the Oval Office before and I'll go on the Concorde or anything. You get me there." I called my wife and told her to pack a bag. An hour and 45 minutes after I hung up the phone, I was in a Navy jet I had commandeered from another Admiral. An hour and a half later I landed in Paris. They drove me across to the military airport--I had to change airports--and I arrived at the check-in counter for the Concorde just in time to give them my bags and walk right onto the plane and take off. There was no delay in the waiting room at all. Four hours and 55 minutes later I was in Washington having taken off at pitch black dark in Paris and landed at sunset in Washington. And if you don't think it is a sensation to sit'in that airplane and fly from the dark to the light and see the sun coming back up but the sun is setting as you are catching up with it, it really is startling. The next morning I was told I had an appointment with the Secretary of Defense at 11:00 and the President at 11:30. After I saw the Secretary of Defense and all he said to me was, "Turner, my job was to get you here, the President has something he wants you to do and he will tell you about it." I sort of stumbled out of his office to drive across the Potomac to the White House and as I did, I said, it is the Central Intelligence Agency. Because the Secretary of Defense, if it were to be a high military appointment, would have wanted to talk to me. I had never met the man before. He certainly would have wanted to measure me in some degree, but he didn't give me the time of day, very polite and nice but he wasn't obviously interested in my character or my ideas at that point. Well my staff in Naples, when we had war gamed it, we 3 Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO1554R003000080001-4 Approved For ease 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO155403000080001-4 thought about a lot of things and we talked about the Central Intelligence Agency and we dismissed that out of hand. So there I was on my own, 15 minutes to go, in a car, crossing the Potomac River saying, what do you tell the President of the United States if he tells you what I think he is going to tell me. Well, 15 minutes later he told me that. And of course he built me up and told me what a great fellow I was and all these things I said to him, "Mr. President, you don't want to assign me to that Central Intelligence job." I said, "You've got a lot of problems with the United States military, it needs a lot of attention, I know you're going to give it to it, and I think I can serve you much better, having spent 31 years getting ready for this, if I stay in uniform." After I made my little pitch of course I said to him, "But, sir, I have worked all my life in the government and certainly want to do whatever I can that will be helpful, and you are my friend and my classmate, if you tell me that I'll do it." I was sort of like a drowning man and grasping for a straw. And I heard him respond to me and I could keep hearing these words central and intelligence coming and I was blurred in my thinking and I could see the kaleidoscope of 31 years going across the screen here and there was that career, it was finished; whereas I had come to Washington thinking maybe it was going up. And it is really quite a roller coaster sensation in 25 minutes to go from thinking maybe--I had a responsible job--but I thought maybe I was going to be given an even more responsible military job and now suddenly here I was going into an entirely different area. 4 Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO1554R003000080001-4 Approved For ease 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO155403000080001-4 Well, grasping for the straw I said to myself, "This is the last moment when you can bargain with the President of the United States; once you have accepted the job you can cajole, you can plead, you can reason, but until you have said yes, you can bargain." And I had been around just enough to appreciate that fundamental fact. And I remembered that he had said to me, "Stan I don't want you to be just the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, you know this is a double job, you are also the Director of Central Intelligence, and that is to coordinate all of the intelligence activities of our country, not just run the CIA, that's a separate job." So while I was grasping here from my leverage, from my bargaining, I said, "Mr. President, I don't think the Director of Central Intelligence has enough authority to coordinate effectively." And he said, "Well, you are in charge of a committee that runs the budget for intelligence." And I said, "Mr. President, no committee ever decided anything and in this town you need authority over the budget, you don't need to be chairman of a committee to do it." Well that started me down a long, torturous path because at the President's directive for the next six months we studied how the Intelligence Community should be reorganized. And in a word, out of that I received the authority to put the budget for the Intelligence Community together. I also received the authority to direct the activity of all the agencies that collect information. We do two things in intelligence: we collect information and then too we try to digest it or analyze it or study it. And I now have authority over all the collecting. I don't have authority to discipline all of the analyzing because we want different views to come forward. Chuck's old outfit has an intelligence bureau 5 Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO1554R003000080001-4 Approved For ease 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80B0155*3000080001-4 which we want to be independent of the CIA, the Defense Department has one we want to be independent so we get different opinions coming forward. But out of these new authorities have come problems as well as prospects for success. It is important that we have a single budget authority because intelligence is becoming increasingly expensive. We not only have the traditional human spy that we've had all along and it is still very critical to us. But we have got these satellites, we've got these listening posts around the world in airplanes and ships and land. And the technical wizardry of our country is so great that these sophisticated systems can do more and more for us. But they cost more and more, and we've got to be sure we are not overlapping. For instance, I'm a military man and every military commander wants to have under his thumb the things he needs to win. Right? But we cannot give each one his own satellite. The country cannot afford that so the military has to be disciplined to learn that I, the Director of Central Intelligence, will support them with my satellites. And we have to learn to get a teamwork going here and that is why I have been given this authority to handle all of these collecting activities by spies, by satellites, by listening posts, or whatever they may be. And despite what you read in the press, we don't think any one of them is more important than the other. In fact, the more you get of the satellite and listening post types of information the more you need the spy to tell you what it is all about. You can get a picture of something and it will tell you a lot, but it doesn't tell you why they built that blooming thing. So we need a balance here. 6 Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO1554R003000080001-4 Approved For0ease 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80B0155403000080001-4 But in the process of assuming these new authorities, there have been problems, and there has been a lot of bad press. And it comes in large measure because we are dealing with big bureaucracy, we are dealing with people who have established the way they do business and don't want to change and don't understand it. And, in particular, we are dealing with a lot of stubborn old admirals and generals--I know them, I'm one of them. It has been a fascinating. experience for me to really see the , Pentagon from the outside, from the other side, and how uncompromising, how unreasonable, how entrenched the military can be in some of these things. The resistance to change is very considerable. But that is not unusual. I think some of you in your businesses found there was resistance to change when you wanted to organize things differently, to do things in ways they hadn't been done before. But we have an extra problem. We have the legacy of Watergate. The legacy of suspicion of everybody in the government that hangs over us today. And with it, the unfortunate tendency of the press to feel that tearing things and people down is more important than building them up. And that if you can be an investigative reporter, and heaven knows we all owe a large debt to Woodward and Bernstein, but the fact that every young graduate of your university and everyone else who goes into journalism says, that's my idol to be a Woodward or a Bernstein, is not good for the country today. Yes we need that, we need the oversight of the press. But we also need some balance and it is very difficult for us in this controversial field of intelligence today while we are making these changes, while we are trying to get people to adapt to these new ways, because those who opposed the change turn to the press and they get a 7 Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO1554R003000080001-4 Approved For ease 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80B0155403000080001-4 ready audience. The press is very receptive to taking up the cudgel. If you can imagine the irony when I reduced the Central Intelligence Agency's spying department by 820 people to save you and me as taxpayers some money and make it more efficient because we were stumbling over each other, then I get the liberal eastern press saying, gee, we're going to have too few of those nasty old spies we've been criticizing for all these years. You can't win on one side or the other. But there is, as some of us were discussing at lunch, a deep resent- ment about the Central Intelligence Agency in this country. I think it is turning around but I think also we've got a long way to go. I think we are trying to be more open within obvious, very great limits of what we can say in terms of necessary secrets, but at least trying to give assurance that we. are working within the law, within the regulations, within the oversight that has been established over us by the Executive Branch and by the Congress. I think the oversight is generally good. In a few areas it is a little excessive. It will temper itself down, I believe, over the next couple of years and we will be able to come up with a good set of oversight procedures that I think will be acceptable to everybody. In the meantime, it is a difficult period for us. It is traumatic if you have been in professional intelligence all your life, very secretive, very much anonymity, not supervised very much by anybody let alone by the Congress, and suddenly you are in this new environment. It is tough for the dedicated professional to adjust. It is tough, of course, to adjust to this criticism in the press after all these years. I went through it in the military after Vietnam, you remember how the military were criticized. 8 Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO1554R003000080001-4 Approved For ease 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80B01554&3000080001-4 Well they recouped from that because they have good people and an important mission. And so does the Central Intelligence Agency. They have super people and they have a very important mission and they will recoup. But, in the meantime, we are still in this period of what I really describe as trauma with all this amount of change, with this amount of criticism, with this new environment where we are more exposed, we are more visible than ever before. We do need some of that visibility. I was saying at lunch, we need the oversight to some degree and it helps me, it strengthens my hand over the Intelligence Community because I say to my people, now we are responsible to the Congress and we must report this and we cannot report one thing and do another, now let's get the story straight here. But as you all know, and I am sure recognize, with this openness has come too much leaking of our important secrets. It is the greatest problem we have today. There has come out of the whole Watergate syndrome such a disregard for what the government claims is. classified, and we have classified too much, that there is so little respect for it that it is just terrible what we read in the papers one day after we talk about it in a very high form. And it does our country great damage. In short, we are trying to be open but we can control that and not disclose what will really damage the country. But when people just go out and leak things, it really can cost us billions of dollars, it will compromise these expensive technical systems on the one hand, it may cost an agent his life on the other hand, or it certainly would deny us the opportunity to gain that kind of information in the future. We must, I think, find ways of staunching e flow of leaks that we are confronted with. 9 Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO1554R003000080001-4 Approved For ease 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80B0155*03000080001-4 Overall let me not leave you with a pessimistic view of life. I am optimistic. I believe the attitude of the Congress, of the public, is becoming more understanding, more receptive of our problems. We are getting more support. We are also going through what I call a generational change, particularly at the Central Intelligence Agency. We've only been in business 31 years so the old-timers are leaving. It is part of the difficult period we are in because we are moving to new and younger leadership. It is not an easy period. The people coming along are splendid and we are going to have good leaders as they move into these spots. But we are in this period of adjustment to the world around us, adjustment to our own world inside because of this generational change and, therefore, there is a lot of ferment. But the basic structure is good, the organization is good, the President's strengthening of my authorities has been helpful. The fine people are there, the capabilities do exist and, I believe, in another two or three years, a lot of this will settle out as I say just as it did with the military on their criticism. I think this will settle out. I think the new procedures that we have with respect to reporting to the Congress will stal%lize now, and I report to seven committees now. I am sure that in a few years we will get that reduced down to a reasonable number. But it just takes a little bit of time. In the meantime, it is an exciting period, an important period, but also a difficult one for all of the people in this profession. Let me try to leave plenty of time for questions here. 10 Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO1554R003000080001-4 Approved ForSease 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80B0155,003000080001-4 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS Q: If I may I'd like to ask one general question. Do you think, viewing our intelligence Community activities world-wide, has the affect of all this upon our ability to collect intelligence abroad been seriously damaged by exposing agents and by the unwillingness of pikspective agents to do anything? A: I don't think so at this point but I think if these leaks and un- authorized publications should continue for a matter of years more that it really will. That is, we see agents who are getting worried because of exposures of other agents in the past. We haven't had any serious exposures at this point but you don't have to have a real exposure to scare a different agent. If you are my agent and somebody writes that Joe Blow out here was my agent and he really wasn't, you'll think, well gee, Joe probably was and maybe my name will appear next. So atirresponsible fellow like Philip Agee, who writes about all our people, if he makes a mistakes even it still hurts us. We can't have that go on forever and I'm looking for legislation, in particular, that will make it a criminal offense to disclose the names of our CIA people which they are doing now just with deliberate- ness. M what the mechanics of these leaks are, how do Q: 4~ - th y occur, do you have a feel for it? A: Well there are several. I guess there may be several categories. One, of course, are espionage and on my watch we have had two espionage cases that have been very serious. One in an industrial plant on the West Coast, one right in my Central Intelligence Agency where people have deliberately taken documents and sold them to the Soviets and that is just very, very bad. We are tightening up but there is a limit to what you can do without disabling your activity, you have so many things that pass across your desk every day that are highly classified. Secondly, there are these, I call them traitors--my legal people shiver when I do because when I say that in public they worry that I'm going to get sued or something--people like Philip Agee who write these books, who now has a thing called The Covert Action Bulletin published on slick paper in Washington, rits"~s"a quarter. Somebody is financing this thing and who does this. The avowed purpose of it is to drive uIS'out of business and to disclose lists of our people in here. It's people like that with a Messianic conviction that they are doing good in the long run and they write books and they publish magazines and articles with a deliberate attempt to hobble us. Thirdly, I'm sorry to have to admit that I'm afraid there are leaks that come from high levels in the government in order to serve purposes, to support policies. I don't condone that in the least but I'm afraid it happens. And fourthly then, there are leaks from within the government, generally at lower levels, in order to subvert or support policy. Somebody in the Navy Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO1554R003000080001-4 Approved For ease 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80B015543000080001-4 wants to have a big aircraft carrier will leak something he thinks supports that before the Congress, or somebody doesn't like our policy towards country "X" will leak something on that in order to get people to go against that policy. But we need some teeth. You can work in the Agriculture Department today and if you were to disclose something about grain futures you can go to jail. If you worked in my Agency and you disclosed something about our. intelligence on Soviet missiles, there is virtually nothing we can do with you really, as long as you don't tell it to the Soviets, you just tell it to the New York Times, which does somehow manage to get it to the Soviet Union. You have to be conducting espionage. You have to be proven to. have deliberately tried to give it to a foreign power. Q: Admiral, of course there are a lot of trouble spots--Iran and Afghanistan--but the ones that are interesting me most is what is the feeling about what is going on in Uganda? I have traveled there and I always thought that country had great possibilities til that SOB got hold of it and tried to ruin the place. A: Well it did have a greater economic potential than any of the countries around it practically. Maybe Kenya would be as good but certainly better than Tanzania and Sudan and others. Q: Do you think this bunch that's got *hold of it now is going to do a good job? A: No. I would say that we're going to be in for a period of uncertainty, changing government. The man who is in charge of it now is 67 years old, an academic, never been in the political arena. He is obviously opposed by a man named Obote, who was the president Amin overthrew. ibit Obote is very unpopular ingnda but he's got more stature in a sense so he will be maneuverin back in. They brought with them 2,000 armed rebels, sort of a small army. What happens to that and who controls it will determine something. We don't really know what has happened to all of Amin's army, we think it has sort of disappeared. But the rebels, the new people rather, only hold about a third of the country geographically, so there is always a possibility of problems from the other two-thirds. You know the country is split, north and south, Christian and Musl~m, Black and Arab. I think they could have considerable problems settling down there and they are going to need help to get their economy going again. Q: What would American policy towards it be--watch and wait? A: I think so. I don't think that our problem will be when should we respond to any requests for assistance because if the government isn't stable enough to handle it, you are just sort of pouring it down the drain. Even if you wanted to go into Iran and help today, if they wanted help, it wouldn't be worthwhile. You don't think that there is enough governmental strength there to use any kind of support. Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80B01554R003000080001-4 Approved For ease 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80B01554&3000080001-4 Q: At least it's an improvement isn't it over what they had? A: Well there are two things that are ahead. One is we don't have Amin and, two, we have dealt Kadahfi a blow here. He sent his troops down there to rescue this thing and he lost and neither one of them are our favorite dictators. So yes, one hopes out of it will come something good but I am just saying, Bob, in the near term I'm worries about continues instability there., b~;fr Q:Ct a'dwl'_1& andhat is the oversight exercise by Congress, the Legislative Branch 6-7,~ - -q Is it your hope and expectation that there will be fairly definitive rules to be followed, a longer list of probes, or general approach in terms of general guidelines? It seems to me that must be a very difficult problem that you face. A: It really has to be general guidelines and it is difficult to do in legislation. I wrote the charter last September myself and I took it to my lawyer and I said, "Let's do this"; and he said, "Well that's fine Stan, but you can't put that in the law." Because what I was saying is things like this. It is the sense of the Congress that we don't want the Central Intelligence Agency destabilizing democratic governments. And the oversight process will check on whether you are doing it or whether you are not doing it; or whether if you do it, it really is in the interest of the country. But if you put a flat law that says you won't destabilize a democratic government, the definition of democratic will just bring you to a total halt. If you ever want to destablize Amin--we didn't but if we wanted to play any role in that, somebody would have claimed that it was a democratic government. We do have an absolute prohibition and I want it enacted into law that we won't do any assassinations. (Tape turned) . Lufthansa airplane that had hi-jackers on it. What did they do? They opened the door of that airplane and they figured where the terrorists were and they shot. It was premeditated murder, assassina- tion--technically. A lawyer might say that you couldn't go and rescue 150 Americans in a plane if the only way of rescuing them was to go in and deliberately kill the terrorists. I still think that is a risk we are taking with assassination. But the problem is so many other of these things are difficult to interpret. So I think we need a guidance that says this country doesn't believe in destabilizing other democratic governments. Now if we are going to do anything like that, it has got to come back and be told to the oversight committees and somebody check on us. So that is what I am hoping will come out but it is hard to satisfy both sides of the issue. Q: As I understand it, you said you report now to seven committees of Congress? Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO1554R003000080001-4 Approved For ease 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO155403000080001-4 A: This is a little complicated but there is a law that says when we do a covert action--covert action is not collecting intelligence, it's influencing people--we must report to seven committees of the Congress what we're planning to do. It used to be eight and one of them dropped out. We are hoping a couple others will drop out and leave it mainly to the two intelligence committees. 1 Q: IsN-that almost an invitation to leaks? A: It is an invitation to leaks when it is a controversial domestic political issue. I don't believe the Congress leaks any more than anybody else. I set an example about why a Navy fellow might leak because he thought it would help get a carrier. A Congress will leak if there is a political advantage to be had on one side or the other. So you have different reasons for leaks and what it means when you have to notify seven committees of the Congress is that you will not propose a covert action unless you are confident that there is going to be consensus about it. If there is a strong minority that doesn't approve of it, then you are worried about the leak. So you narrow your range of sort of how risky you'll be in these things. , Q: Admiral, what's the United States' view of thgci-i"A"-ef the Islamic government situation on Iran and what -ffe? A: Well we are very worried. It is near chaos and we've got two govern- ments. We've got the religious government and we've got the secular government. The danger today is that those people who oppose the religious government, or pieces of it--like wearing the veil, like having banks but no interest chargeable, and some of these provisions that are very difficult to reconcile with modern life--that those people have no place to coalesce their opposition to these Islamic decisions other than in the West. The only place they can turn is to the militant guerilla left and find a home for dissent with Ayatollah Khomeini. So if the government can't get its act together soon and back Mr. Bazargan and get the religious element, you know, give him whatever broad guidance they want to give but not cutting the Prime Minister's authority up, we're very worried that it will be the leftist who combine to represent the majority sentiment perhaps in the country. Just as they combined behind the Ayatollah--why? The majority sentiment was they didn't want the Shah. It wasn't that they wanted the Ayatollah. The second danger, of course, is that the county ill fragment on its periphery. The Kurds, the Azerbaijan, the these .different tribal ethnic groups that want to be semi-auton mous at least, if not independent of Iran, will start fragmenting off. And that's peeling an onion that can go on a long way because that gets into Iraq, Turkey, the Soviet Union and Afghanistan. I mean all those tribes, of course they don't have clear lines of national boundaries, they spill all over. So we're not optimistic. I'm afraid that Iran and the biggest problem is that the military has just disappeared and the government just doesn't have an arm. They have got little militias that they have created on Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO1554R003000080001-4 Approved For Oease 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80B015503000080001-4 their own. Perhaps the one hope almost is that some military leader will arise as a phoenix from the ashes here and coalesce at least a division or something someplace and provide some backbone for the government. But they have decimated the military to such an extent that I don't know if it is possible. Q: Do you feel that these executions are hurting the Ayatollah? Q: Admiral, with the SALT treaty coming up we hear these conflicting statements that the problem is the loss of the monitoring stations in Iran and presents the, as quoted in U.S. News, (inaudible) .. we hear these conflicting opinions, what your own? I thought I heard you quoted once but I never heard it again, that you thought it was quite serious. A: It is serious. It doesn't mean we can't recoup from it, particularly over time, but those stations were important to us. Q: What affect is it going to have on the SALT treaty? A: Well, we looking, of course, at every alternative way to gain that information and we think we have some pretty good ideas in mind. We will probably pursue four of them and end up, I mean we'll start pursuing four of them and end up working on two of them if you see what I mean. You go down the path until you see which one will pay off the most. It's important enough that we'll do something like that. There are 60 some provisions of the treaty. These sites only affect a couple of them. They are important provisions. Then you have to ask yourself what's the risk to the country if we are not as confident of checking those provisions you see. What happens if the Soviets really cheat? Are we better off with no controls over the Soviets on these two or three provisions that are affected by those sites? Would you rather have zero control--let's say we just erase those from the treaty--than you would to have those provi ns and not be able to be quite as confident as you would like you can check on them. Now those are decisions beyond my camp. I only get to tell people how well I can verify these and I now have to provide an estimate without those sites. LL- Q : y A: Well, I don't say that and it is very complicated and very technical. I say that I'm in the monitoring business not the verifying business, and it may sound like I'm picking a nit, but I have to maintain a status of impartiality as to whether it is a good treaty or bad treaty or should be passed or shouldn't be passed. Otherwise, you will suspect that my telling you I've got a 90 percent confidence I can replace Iran, or a 70 percent confidence, or a 30 percent confi- dence is biased because I'm coming to a conclusion,,you see what I mean. So I don't ever say it is verifiable or not verifiable because 15 Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO1554R003000080001-4 Approved For ease 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80B0155z3000080001-4 that's not only how well I can check on it, that's what is the treaty really demand. No treaty is so express when it says 820 missiles that's fairly express, but then you run into a question, well, what's a missile. That sounds silly but a lot of the provisions of the treaty would require interpretation. So I'll tell people this is what they have done. They've built three things like this, does that mean that they have violated--they've build three new warehouses around this missile site--does that violate the treaty provision that says you can't store an excess number of missiles around your missile silos? You see what I mean? Is three warehouses too many or is it four? I can only tell you they built three, I can't tell whether .they violated a provision of the treaty without getting subjectively involved in the treaty. That has got to be done by the President and the Senate. The President should not send the treaty to the Senate if he doesn't feel comfortable with it. And there is one more factor I left out and that is what is the risk to the country. For verifi- cation you ask yourself how do you feel about Turner's prognosis that he can tell you what's happening? And I'll tell them in percentage-- 90 percent, 70 percent. They are not all 100 percent that's for sure. None of them are 100 percent but, okay, some of them were very high, some of them were medium. So you look and you say, how does Turner's monitoring report strike me. Then you say, how ambigious is the treaty here, is Turner really going to be able to check on the thing to the detail that is needed. Thirdly you say, what's the risk if they get away with it. And I will tell the Senate. I'll say, if they get away with that provision, each provision I'll say, if they get away with that this will be the impact on us in terms of whether it will increase their military capabilities. So you look at each provision and you say, that's how well you can check on it and this is what happens if they cheat on it. And then that's a tough judgment there that really will be made by the Senate. Q: Admiral, you are talking about something that has bothered me a lot. I've a great deal of confidence in the technological ability of this country to determine almost anything they want to determine if they put their minds to it. There was a quote here in U.S. News & World Report back in March that, and I just read this, "Associates of the President say his chief problem with intelligence from the CIA is that he receives a mountain of facts and figures but not enough interpretation and assessment of what they mean. Said one aide, 'It's getting more and more difficult to find people who can write a good, clear analytical sentence.'" Well, that's maybe in our educa- tional system and maybe it isn't, but the fact is that I suspect that a lot of your analytical work is so complex that it is impossible to write in one simple, clear sentence and this may reflect on the audience that you have to feed your information into. And no matter how good, what I'm trying to get at is, no matter how good your infor- mation is;if the ability of the audience your feeding is limited in their conception and absorbtion of that information, even the best intelligence in the world can go for naught. What is your appraisal of that flow of your information and analyses into the executive and congressional levels? Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO1554R003000080001-4 Approved For ease 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80B0155403000080001-4 A: Well I'll be candid with you. Of course it is much more difficult to get across to the congressional level than to the executive level. I don't have any problem getting across to the President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, Brzezinski. Number one, they are all bright and number two, they all do their homework. I don't believe any of them have the kind of complaint that is registered here. With this exception that that's a traditional complaint against any soothsayer, I mean the delphic oracle, the original problem. There are limitations on how you express difficult problems. There are also limitations on our information. Yes, you have problems getting people who can write clearly, just aslot of people do. But, I find that we are again in a transition that "I didn't mention in my remarks in how we analyze intelligence. It used to be largely military intelligence we were concerned with. And in military you are looking for facts. You want to know if the gun will go 10,000 meters or 12,000 meters because if you are the guy on the other end, it makes a big difference to you. In political intelligence, diplomatic intelligence, economic intelligence, it isn't so cut and dried. You want to know the pros and cons of it. We are frankly having trouble as we keep adjusting to these many new fields that we are in today that we weren't even in 10, 15 years ago--terrorism, narcotics, energy predictions, population growth, grain harvest. We are in all of these things and we've got. to get analysts to understand it isn't so black and white and it isn't just facts that we're looking for, it's the pros and cons. I get too many analyses that come tto me and say, this is going to happen in 37 and a half days. I don t want that kind. I want something that says there is a trend that is pushing events in this direction. Now there are also some countermoves that may mean it won't happen as rapidly as we think or something. I'm sorry, it's walking around your question. Q: No, I appreciate what you said and do I get the inference that your problem with the Congress is somewhat more severe in this area? A: Well I don't want to be critical of them too much but number one, you don't get their attention as much--they've got all kinds of things going. You go give a presentation and the room is half full when you get there, it's three-fourths full in the middle, and it's one-fourth full at the end. It is hard when you are giving a very complex technical subject to give a lecture if you fellows were all coming and going out here and nobody was here for more than a third of the time. And they are limited in their ability to find time to study these things on their own, limited by all the security problems. It is difficult for them to keep abreast of some of these technical issues. So they end up relying on one or two members who really do study it together, there always is somebody who knows it well. Q: Well Admiral, this is by far the most serious of my concerns if you want to cover as wide a spectrum as possible. For a long period of time some people, at least, have been greatly worried about the presence of a hostile government on the island of Cuba. How much of 17 Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO1554R003000080001-4 Approved For?easel 08/14: CIA-R P80BO155003000080001-4 a 4"_ do you see-+-*h security the United States in the control of the Panama Canal by potentially hostile, both idealogically and militarily, being? A: I think it is modest. We certainly wouldn't want it. As a naval officer, we're not very dependent on the Panama Canal anymore; you can take most of the Navy ships through the Panama Canal. But today, the way our Navy isD~tructured, if you can't take an aircraft carrier you almost mighttoir""take the rest. That's an overstatement, but for a major war what you would want to do would be to shift carriers around and they've got to go around the other way. In peace time, if they really not only owned the Canal with some hostile force, but wouldn't let us use it for peace time traffic, I'm sure it would be a substantial economic cost to us. On the other hand, that's getting to be a pretty hostile act and, of course, it cuts off their own revenue and so on. The only time we've had that happen is at Suez, when the Canal was physically closed. But places like the Mallacca Straits and Gibraltar and other choke points of commerce, nobody, at this stage,~`tried to close off around the world. It doesn't mean it could not happen. One certainly doesn't want to see a hostile government in Panama and yet, the actual physical consequences of it, it seems to me are not likely to be as dangerous today as they would have 50 years ago let's say, when we really depended on that. Q: Many people, felt we should not sign a treaty for the Panama Canal e in o me o d P ,.r_. . _..__ ~. .1, . ? thy. T -au I anama an le ,JJ]9L7)!&244 Al with Cu a and so forth, that when you don't do that you have got a ~?~A - *et4vii situation there which is an open invitation to Castro and Russia to move it. This has nothing to do with whether the Canal has lost its usefulness to us. See what I mean? If you just say, alright, we're not going to do anything about this and we'll just let it go and let the pressure build up and the situation get worse, it just seems to me that Castro and Russia would be delighted to step in and fish in troubled waters. A: Well, as you all know, our relations with Latin and Central America hajust never been very good. We've never paid much attention to it. Every Administration has had a new Kennedy plan for Latin America or somebody's plan and this Administration has tried two. I would say, in my personal opinion and this is out of my intelligence business, but the one area, with the exception of this Panama Canal Treaty, where in the last couple of years we've not made any substantial progress is in the hemisphere. So this is really the one thing that has tried to move us forward in this hemisphere, to get this festering sore out of the way. I hope it will be the kernel that will sprout up with better relations with other countries. Q: Stan, from watching all this from the outside, it seems to me that all that you've said and all that is taking place in the world is generating a tremendous need for a declaration on our part in the matter of policy. And that the policy waiting to be declared is that we are, as a nation, taking on a responsibility reorganizing the world in 18 Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO1554R003000080001-4 Approved For .ease 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO155 3000080001-4 keeping with a common sense objective, namely that commercially and economically the world is one. And that we, in turn, are committed, and I think we are committed without informing the public to this effect. We are comma ted to doing everything in our power to organize the future in harmony with this fundamental fact and that a lot of the difficulties that you are faced with would gradually disappear because, that is if such a declaration were made, then there is a base to judge and arrive at conclusions as to what is in harmony with the interests and objectives of the United States in the world and what is out of gear and out of phase with those objectives. Do you see any chance or any tendency A for the appearance of something akin to a declaration on the part of the Executive Branch of the government to the effect that we are not just a bread basket of the rest of the world but we are philosophically inclined to organize the world in harmony with our own principles and ideas and so forth and so on? A: I think there is some move in the general direction. I certainly agree with what you are saying. I think the President's stand on human rights for instance. That is part of our heritage, that is the kind of thing we stand for. It is very difficult to apply uniformly around the world, but this is our ideology instead of the communist ideology and it needs to be put forward. Q: It's head-on in collision with, we'll say, the Soviet world which is rapidly geared to the control of the future in keeping with their own premises. A: I think, in addition, that we're working more today to cooperate with our friends and allies to solve problems around the world instead of having the United States tackle them all themselves. Q: Yes, that's right, if the purpose of this cooperation is openly declared. We're left pretty much in having to deduce what the policy really is from events and from statements that are myriad from time to time, but no specific statement as to the fact that we will use every power we've got and every institution in the country shall be geared to a contribution to whatever this policy turns out to be. A: Well that probably would help if we could enunciate that better. Q: And that seems to me _j, a, NP, responsibility on the citizenry& cue d come up with that. A: Yes. Q: I'm a little troubled by the thought that we ought to have a general guideline saying that we will not interfere with the internal affairs of other countries. That restricts us to a certain degree. I think, for example, of Allende in Chile, who was certainly anti-American; and I'm thinking now also of Nicarauga, where you'd have a hard time Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO1554R003000080001-4 Approved For`ease 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80B0155,03000080001-4 deciding which was the democratic government in Nicarauga. It seems to me that it's a little hazardous to say that we will never interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, because we might not interfere and have our worst enemies come to power by that very fact. We can't always win, for example in Iran. If you were going to take Nicarauga today, would you say that Samoza was the epitomy of democratic government in Nicarauga or would you work for the other side? A: That's part of the problem. Now nobody has suggested that we have a rule that says we can't interfere in other people's internal affairs. They were suggesting we should say we won't overthrow a democratically constituted government. I think it would be the height of hypocrisy to say we don't interefere in other people's internal affairs because doing nothing is interfering in the internal affairs of many people today because of our preeminence in the world and because of our whole influence on the world. But there is the tremendous problem, who's democratic and who's not. I certainly wouldn't say Semoza qualified under that. I doubt many people would contend that, but between Samoza and Great Britian there are some gray areas where you'd have a genuine debate between political scientists and that is what we want to avoid in getting hung up in some nonsense like that. I happen to think that Allende was a communist. He wasn't democrat- ically elected. He had a minority of the vote when he was in there, and I happen to think they were right to helpL v- . The Central Intelligence Agency and ITT was probably on the right track. Q: There has been a great many questions bantered around here but recently there haS~been several books telling about the intelligence operations in World War II which to me, personally, er an eye opener. I thought they were very helpful and I was in favor of everything that went on there, but it makes you realize how complicated. a problem it is. Now, of course, Are they helpful to you? I would think they would be good publicity but I don't know. A: Those are helpful--The Man Called Intrepid. There are a number of those that have taken only authorized released information that was old enough and was published. The time had elapsed so particularly the British released their files and some of these--Bodyguard of Wise is the real classical work. They do, I think they are just fascinating. Those, I think, are helpful. There are two things that are unhelpful. One is the book like this man Stockwell wrote and Snepp and a man named Epstein has written one in which he does disclose details about some of our agents that are very... Let me suggest to you that what happens with our people who write books and people who write magazine articles and newspaper articles is they don't realize how easily they are used. The Epstein book is all about an internal battle between some people inside CIA and some with the FBI on whether certain agents were double-agents or true agents; were they working for us or were they really working for us and the Soviets at the same Approved For Release 2001/08/44 : CIA-RDP80B01554R003000080001-4 Approved For ase 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO155 3000080001-4 time. You'll nev a resolve those things. You'll ever get a fellow to finally sit up and confess, or if he confesses you can't believe his confession and so on. But, those old-timers are refighting their own battle using this fellow and his book. And in the process, in order to win their so-called fight with their old enemies within the CIA or the FBI, they are disclosing things about fellows in the Soviet Union who are still alive, we hope, and that is just criminal. But that is what hurts, it is these more current ... I think part of it is pride though. Q: We lost our bases in Turkey. Now that we've lost Iran I'm just won- dering if some of that slack can't be taken up with the space we retrieved in Turkey? A: Some but, unfortunately, not to the extent that we had in Iran. It is a very complex geographical, geometrical problem. Q: Well, is it true though that satellites are not the entire answer-- you've got to have people working on the ground to know what is going on? A: Oh, yes. Now take something like verifying SALT. That is highly dependent on the satellite and technical things. It is just the Soviet society is pretty good at keeping its secrets compared with us. They don't have an Aviation Week magazine that prints the details of all their missiles. Yes, we try to get spies to tell us about their missiles. But I'll be candid with you, it is tough going and yet from satellites you can see the missiles and measure the missiles and so on. So, what you look for spies to tell you most is why people are doing things. But yes, you need to use all devices you can and not just the satellite n the SALT treaty, but more reliante,on the technical there anywhere else perhaps. Q: You said, Admiral Turner, that you can see some light down toward the end of the tunnel insofar as the public image of the CIA is concerned considering the unfavorable publicity and so forth. It seems to me that maybe we should work towards a depoliticization of the Agency on the basis that it is anagency that has to stand from one administration to another and, therefore, it should be not exactly Civil Service but shouldn't be dependent so much on the vagaries of political philosophies and so forth. Do you see a possibility of that happening or do you think it is a good idea for it to happen? A: Gee, I hope that is what we are doing. That is, I hope we are not politicized. End of Tape Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO1554R003000080001-4 Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO1554R003000080001-4 Approved For Release 2001/08/14: CIA-RDP80BO1554R003000080001-4