[SPEECH BY LT. GENERAL VERNON A. WALTERS BEFORE NATIONAL CONVENTION VETERANS OF FOREIGN WARS - CHANGING INTELLIGENCE IN A CHANGING WORLD]

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80R01731R002000100005-8
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 19
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 3, 2002
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: August 20, 1975
• Content Type: SPEECH

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by
LT. GENERAL VERNON A. WALTERS
before
NATIONAL CONVENTION
VETERANS OF FOREIGN WARS
CHANGING INTELLIGENCE IN A CHANGING WORLD
Los Angeles
20 August 1975
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Commander-in-Chief, Fellow Veterans and
Distinguished Guests:
I am particularly happy to have this opportunity
to address this National Convention of this great
organization, of which I am proud to say I am one of
the members... this organization which treasures the
love of our country and cherishes the values that have
made America great and free. My pleasure at being
here today is increased by seeing sitting here Leon
Turrou, who is the Commander of the Paris Post, as you
know, and probably does more to project a favorable
image of the United States than anybody else I know,
official or private.
And looking back across the gulf of thirty-four
years I see here to the time When :ILwas :a young private,
my tough, great First Sergeant, Dom Volpe, who did send
me to Officers Candidate School.
But, today I want to talk to you about intelligence:
what it is and why we need it. Intelligence is more vital
to our nation today than at any time in its history.
Modern intelligence is the painstaking collection and
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analysis of facts and actions of foreign governments
that may in some way affect the future of our nation.
Intelligence must be timely or it is not intelligence
at all; it is simply history. It must be operational
in the sense that it covers the problems with which
our policymakers have to deal. And they must have
good intelligence if they are to establish sound policies.
Why do we need it? We need it because we live in a
small world that is growing smaller every day. In the
old days they used to say the United States was unreachable
and unbeatable. Unfortunately we no longer enjoy those
advantages.
Why do we need it? Well all we need to do is to look
at the world we live in. Yes, there is detente; but let
us look at what is happening in that detente. We see the
Soviet Union deploying four new types of third generation
intercontinental ballistic missiles, and we may be seeing
the beginnings of a fifth different type that they are
also deploying. We see them building larger submarines
with more tubes to launch intercontinental---ballistic'
missiles. We see them developing aircraft: with a capa-
bility against the United States. We see them adding
tanks to every rifle division in the Soviet Army. We
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see them improving the training of their personnel and
all of the equipment in the hands of their personnel.
This is what the Soviets are doing today. And the
Chinese are either doing it or will be doing it
tomorrow, and not since Valley Forge have any other
countries had the opportunity or the capability against
the United States which exists today. And yet, at this,
the time of the greatest need for intelligence in our
nation's history, we see a massive attack against our
nation's intelligence. An effort to make it appear
immoral, shady, un-American. And the curious thing is
that this effort is not just going on in the United
States--it's going on against all the intelligence
services of our allies--in Britain, or France, or
West Germany, or Italy. It may be a coincidence; you
can draw your own conclusions on that.
But now there is a great effort to tell you that
all this stuff is very immoral and the Founding Fathers
wouldn't have liked it. Well, in this bicentennial
year,:_I have done a little research on the! Founding
Fathers in intelligence. I've come up with some pretty
interesting things. George Washington, the father of
our country, was probably one of the greatest intelligence
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users in American history. He used it in every sense.
One of the things I learned, among others, was that he
organized at least two attempts to kidnap Benedict
Arnold and you know what he was going to do with him
when he got him! He operated a listening post; he
bugged the British headquarters in Philadelphia. Thank
God he did!
You know, now you have this idea we shouldn't keep
any secrets; we should let everything hang out; we
should tell everybody everything. Well, let me quote you
George Washington on that subject. He wrote a letter to
his Chief of Intelligence in New Jersey, Colonel Elias
Dayton,and this is what he said and I quote and I
know this one by heart: "The need for procuring good
intelligence is so evident that I need say nothing more
about it. All that remains for me is to tell you that
these matters must be kept as secret as possible and
for the lack of such secrecy they generally fail, no
matter how well planned or promising the outlook."
That's how George Washington felt about splashing our
secrets all over the place.
Benjamin Franklin understood the use of intelligence.
For three years before the Revolution, from 1772 to 1775,
he was the Assistant Postmaster of the British Colonies
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in North America. And do you know what he was doing?
He was opening the British's mail, and they caught him
and they fired him. You can come down from that time
until now. What did President Truman say in the late
1950s? President Truman said, "It matters not to the
United States whether its secrets become known through
the action of spies or through publication. In both
cases the damage to the United States is exactly the
same. And I for one," said Mr. Truman, "do not believe
that the bests interests of our country are served by
going on the principle that everybody has the right to
know all of our military secrets."
We are now engaged in a great experiment to determine
whether any great nation can run its secret intelligence
service, so to speak, in a gold fish bowl. Now we may
succeed, because we are a very unusual people; but if we
do it will be just like going to the moon-.-we'.11 have
been the only ones who ever did it.
We believe these investigations can be healthy; they
can be productive, provided that they are conducted in
a positive, constructive and responsible fashion and they
do not cripple American intelligence. The safety of the
United States is far too precious to become the football--
the political football--for anybody's ambitions.
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We as Americans fully accept our American way of
ensuring proper oversight--proper Congressional oversight--
over our intelligence systems. And here again, .-we feel
this can work providing it is handled responsibly. We can
make it work and we will make it work, providing it
operates with fairness and discretion and without sweeping
collective judgments. We cannot resist the advance of
Communism if we are tied hand and foot and our pockets
are turned inside out and the contents are:exposed for
every foreigner to look at. We cannot operate with
all of our secrets being turned out for public view.
Not long ago I saw a cartoon. It showed a couple
at the movies, and one said to the other, "You know,
this must be a real old film; the CIA are the good guys."
That tells you the kind of environment we have to operate
in today. The use of intemperate language portrays those
who serve our country in intelligence as the real enemies
of the country, the real threat to our freedoms, and this
is outrageous treatment_for..people.who..are serving..our.
nation loyally and often in lonely and dangerous ways.
I am not an old CIA man--I came there three and a half
years ago--and I want to tell you these are great people;
they're Americans just like you--they live by the same
standards and have the same values. And I want to tell you
that I am as proud of my association with these people in
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American intelligence as I am of my associates in the
Armed Forces over a long period of years.
Because of a few overzealous people, who may have
done some improper things over the long span of 27 years,
the honorable men and women who work in intelligence are
being subjected to a torrent of mud and innuendo and they
deserve better than this from those whose freedoms they
are guarding.
We see in all of this an effort to create in America
some sort of a new caste of untouchables: people who work
in CIA who should be shunned by all decent: citizens and
are unfit for further employment after they leave. Well,
I don't think it will work because I trust: the fairness and
understanding of the American people.
You know, I marvel in a sense how relatively little
we've been hurt by this. At a time when we have had large
cuts in personnel in American intelligence, we have to
rely more on the assistance of our foreign. friends and I
marvel at their steadfastness in many cases. But the one
thing we will never be able to judge is how many people
would have come to us with information and. who didn't be-
cause they were afraid they'd read their names on the
front pages of our newspapers. This is something we will
never know. I am not going to tell you that over 27 years
and the tens of thousands of people who have passed through
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the organization for which I work, that we've not had
some bad apples. We have. But they have been few and
far between and you don't base things on exceptions.
We are using today's standards to look back over the
past and judge various things that were done. I submit
that if any other organization in the United States
Government was submitted to the kind of scrutiny we-have
beerr~-submi tted to over the last 27 years that our record
would look pretty good in contrast.
We hope these current investigations will produce
guidelines for us--guidelines by which we will abide and
which we intend to respect. But we hope these guidelines
will include some mechanism for change as the perception
of the American people of tile: threat that-..threatens them
changes.
You know, you hear a lot about the negative parts
that are cited against us in the Rockefeller Commission's
report; what ?you don'~t_hdar.is'the basic statement: that most
of the matters on which the Rockefeller Commission's investi-
gation focused had been corrected by the Agency itself before
these investigations started.
Now in the matter of assassinations, of which you've
heard a great deal, I do not believe it is in the interests
of the United States and its image around the world for us
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in the CIA to point-a finger at anybody inside,-outside,
above, or along side the Agency. The Committees are
looking into that matter--let them make their report,
that will be their responsibility.
You hear all this outrage about the drug experiments.
Well, I think President Ford spoke for all. of us when he
described this tragic situation when this man died--committed
suicide--after being experimented on with these drugs. But
go back to the atmosphere
of that time, the early fifties--I'm talking about something
almost a quarter of a century ago. We saw American soldiers
for the first time in American history who had been made
prisoners, not only refusing to come home, but denouncing
their own country. We saw Cardinal Mindzenty and other
brave people in Eastern Europe who had'.resisted all the_-:-
tortures, pressures and imprisonments by t:he Nazis suddenly
caving in and appearing before us glassy-eyed or hollow-
eyed to confess anything their Communist captors wanted them
to confess. By and large the American people believed this
was being done with mind-controlling drugs. We feared-
these could be used on our diplomats and on our Armed Forces
and an effort was made to find how these things work and
how-we-could counter them. And it wasn':t just the CIA or
the Armed Forces that was engaging in this. A large number
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of institutions of learning in the United States--
universities--did not see anything morally wrong with
this. One of the problems is when you try to judge
something by the standards of 25 years later, and the
perceptions of them. The last great investigation we
had into the CIA was the Doolittle investigation and
what did they leave us with? They told us the United
States was faced with an implacable enemy who was deter-
mined.to destroy us by all means at their command and
that we should match their dedication with ours and
their ruthlessness with ours.
Rummaging through the garbage
pails of history, of events in the 50s and. 60s. I
just hope that equal time will be given to the late 70s
and early 80s because that's when your freedom and mine
is going to be decided.
Now we are being pilloried; not just we in CIA, but
all of us in intelligence, for our so-called sins of
commission. What I am concerned about is that in 1990
at some later investigation, our successors will be
asked: You mean you failed to do this? You mean you
didn't do that? You mean you weren't watching for this?
You know, we were able to stand a naval Pearl Harbor;
I don't know whether we. Would be-able to stand a nuclear
Pearl Harbor. As President Ford said yesterday, intelli-
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gence is essential to our national security and even
survival. We understand that we must operate according
to the rules and principles that are acceptable to the
American people, but we do not believe-.that that means
we must dismantle the intelligence apparatus of the
United States or cripple our capability to collect
intelligence on those who might threaten us.
So often we have done this in the past after our
various wars: we built up a tremendous-.apparatus and then
we've demolished it. Even today we have an extraordinary
situation: we have no legislation to protect our national
secrets. I think we're the only nation in the world that
doesn't. The only legislation we have is one that prevents
people from going to a foreign power and giving them our
secrets. If you give our secrets to a newspaper, or publish
them or talk about them over the radio, our legislation
doesn't cover that.
You know, we're not asking for any special privilege
in this area. We would just like to be on an even'. footing
with the Department of Agriculture, the Census Bureau, or
the Internal Revenue Service; because in the United States
today, if you publish the crop forecast of the Department
of Agriculture you can go to jail. If you publish some-
body's income tax return, you can go to jail. If you
publish certain information from the Census Bureau, you
can go to jail. But you can't for giving away the-,national
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defense secrets of the United States.
American companies who have helped us to place our
people overseas are being pilloried and damned and berated
as though they had done something shameful.. What do they
expect us to do? Send our people overseas with a sign
around,.their necks saying, "I am a CIA Agent." How naive
do they think we are?
As President Kennedy told us, we in intelligence,
"..are doomed,when we stumble,to be criticized and ridiculed
and our successes are condemned to be passed over in silence."
And, believe me, we do have successes. Successes beyond
what I had dreamed when I came to this job. We simply do
not feel it is reasonable for the United States intelligence
agencies to be so pilloried that our friends will refuse
to work with us.
Not long ago the head of a friendly foreign service
said to me, "Don't you in the United States have legislation
against indecent exposure, against taking off your clothes
in public?" I said, "Certainly we do." "Well," he said,
"tell me something. Why do you practice internationally
what you prohibit inside the United States?"
The United States has made a great contribution to
intelligence. We collect intelligence in many ways. A
large part of it overtly, from the newspapers, from radio
broadcasts, and so forth. A large part of it technically'
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and this, I think, is one of the areas where American
inventive genius has made a tremendous and a new
contribution to the art of collecting intelligence.
We have made another contribution in the field of the
application of analysis to the facts and the evidence
before us. But in spite of this we still need human
intelligence...spies, if you will. No technology, no
newspaper will get you inside the decision process of
someone to attack or not attack. You need people for
that. We have developed these great skills in the United
States intelligence community and now we're told that
these are a danger to the United States because they may
get into the hands.of some dictator. Well.. I trust the
American people and I don't think we're going to have
any dictator. If we had one then the Armed Forces of the
United States would be a danger. The police would be a
danger if they got into the hands of a dictator. Well
I just don't think the American people are ready to
accept any dictator or puppet Congress or anything that
is contrary to the Constitution of our country.
We Americans are a hard people for other people to
understand and that has good sides as well. as bad. You
know we don't :move. in these, majestic, slow historical
curves like other nations. I was a young corporal in
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the Army in 1941 when France had fallen, the German thrust
in Russia was moving forward at 30 miles a day and the
extension of military service in the United States was
approved by the United States Congress by one vote majority.
Five months later we were at war all over the world.
But we face another problem today. We face a
different kind of attack that is perhaps more dangerous
than the attack across the borders or across the seas or
out of the skies. It is a new form of war. I would simply
like to read to you what a Chinese writer wrote 2,500 years
ago in a book called, The Art of War, and if any of it
sounds familiar to you, it sounds familiar to me too.
This man writing 25 centuries ago was describing how you undo
your enemies, and this is what he said, "The most consummate
art is to subdue your enemies without having to fight them
on the battlefield. The direct method of war is necessary only
on the battlefield; but it is only the indirect methods that
can lead to true victory and its consolidation.- Denounce
everything that is good in your opponent's country. Involve
their leaders in criminal operations, undermine them by every
means and expose them to the public scorn of their fellow
countrymen. Use the vilest type of individual. Cause
trouble by every means at hand within their government.
Spread discord and quarrels among the citizens of the
opposing country. Agitate the young against the old.
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Destroy by all means the weapons, supply and discipline
of your opponent's armed forces. Cover with ridicule
their old traditions and their heritage. Be generous
in your offers and:rewards to purchase information or
accomplices. Put secret agents in place everywhere.
Never stint on money or promises and thus you will reap
a rich reward." Those words were written 25 centuries
ago and all I ask you gentlemen'-.is to look around you
all over the world and see what is going on.
But I am not a pessimist. I have faith in the good
sense of the American people and that that: good sense
will prevail. The good sense of their representatives
and their fairness will prevail. The U.S.. will come
through these present difficulties.
You know if we.look at the whole 6,000 years of
human history of which we have a record, we can see a
current flowing in the direction of greater freedom and
dignity for every individual. And many tyrants in the
past have been able temporarily to stem that flow. None
of them has ever been able to stem it permanently. And
I 5a not think that the medieval. tyranny of modern communism
is going to stem it either.
One of the problems we have, though, is that so many
of our people find the need to berate the United States,
to run us down. To run down the achievements that we have
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done as a people. You know, our society is not perfect
and we know it, and we're trying to improve it. But we're
not like the people who already :think- they'=are in
Paradise and there is nothing to improve. Yes, there are
shortcomings in our society, but we have given the greater
percentage of our people a chance at the good things of life
than any other society that man has devised since we came
out of the caves.
Not long ago I was in Taiwan, Formosa,and I was taken
to visit the National Palace Museum where are stored the
treasures of Chinese history. My guide was a young
Chinese girl student who spoke beautiful English, and at
the end of the visit she said to me, "What: do you think of
all this?" And I said, "You know, it leaves me kind of
thoughtful. When I look at the 6,000 years of your history
compared to the 200 years of our history." And she smiled
and she said, "Yes, that is only half a dynasty, isn't it?"
And I thought for a minute and I said, "Yes, but in that
half a dynasty we went from an empty continent to walk the
silent face of the moon." And only Americans have walked
that silent face of the moon.
We have fought great wars in this century. We have
annexed no territory; we have compelled no one to become
an American citizen. Quite the contrary, when the war
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was over we stretched out our hands to those we had
defeated and we pulled them back to their feet. We
are the only nation in history who has ever financed
its competitors back into competition with us. There
is no parallel for what we have done as a nation and
we have nothing to be ashamed of.
Thirty-four years ago I came into the Army as a
young soldier. I am as proud today,-as I told you
already, of my association with those who work in
American intelligence--in the FBI, the CIA, and Army.
and Navy and Air Force intelligence--as I am of my
service inthe Armed Forces. These are devoted defenders
of the United States and they fight on a silent battle-
field of intelligence on which we have not: chosen'-tofight,
but we have been made to fight--not through out own choice.
These people are no threat to America's freedom; they are
its defenders against those who would destroy us.
Every morning as I go to work, as I enter the building
where I work, I look on my right and cut into the stone wall
I see those stars that memorialize those men and women of
my organization who have laid down'their lives in defense
of your freedom and mine as truly as anyone who ever fell
on the noisier battlefields. I look across to the other
wall and I see the motto of our organization which is:
"You shall know the truth and the truth stall make you free."
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Sometimes I wonder if the world in which we live now
should not change that motto to read: You must know
the truth for only the truth will keep you free.
The real issue before the American people today is
not the truth or the falsehood of some of these solitary
allegations, some of them reaching back a quarter of a
century. The. real issue facing the American people today
is the following: Is the United States as a free and demo-
cratic nation going to have eyes to see and ears to hear
or are we going to stumble into the future blind and deaf
until the day we have to choose between abject humiliation
and nuclear blackmail--that's the real issue facing the
American people today.
Winston Churchill told my generation that on our
journey our only companion would be ."....blood, sweat, tears
and toil." And as our nation journeys into the last quarter
of this century I hope we have three companions with us for
that journey. I hope we have faith, for dark is the road
of the man who walks without faith. I hope we have
enthusiasm, which drives the young and motivates the older.
And most of all I hope we have courage, which is the
greatest of all virtues because it is the guarantee of all
the others. With God's help and your support, we will not
let the United States down.
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