REMARKS OF WILLIAM J. CASEY BEFORE THE BUSINESS COUNCIL AT THE HOMESTEAD HOT SPRINGS, VA, 8 MAY 1982

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP83M00914R001900210042-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 11
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 21, 2007
• Sequence Number: 42
• Publication Date: May 8, 1982
• Content Type: REPORT

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10 May 1982
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Please substitute this revised
copy of Mr. Casey's speech before The
Business Council for the one sent to
you on 7 May.
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EXTENSION
FORM RFEB M 85 24 REPLACES FORMsti-e (47)
WHICH MAY BE USED.
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REMARKS OF WILLIAM J. CASEY
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
BEFORE
THE BUSINESS COUNCIL
AT
THE HOMESTEAD
HOT SPRINGS, VIRGINIA
Saturday, 8 May 1982
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Always happy to get away to visit with you in these surroundings.
Didn't you love seeing last night how happy Al Haig was not to be in
Buenos Aires? The Secretary didn't leave me too much to say. But he
certainly conveyed our determination to pick up the ball on the ten yard
line and move it forward.
I will tell you how the American Intelligence Community sees the
opposition and how it contributes to working the problem as Secretary Haig
put it last evening.
Our intelligence service had fallen behind badly for having lost.50%
of its manpower and 40% of its funding during the seventies. My job is to
run and focus on our policy objectives, and at the same time rebuild a still
huge apparatus of technical marvels and trained observers capable of sweeping
up and gathering information and perceptions from all over the world and, more
important and challenging, to identify and assess the vulnerabilities and
opportunities critical to our interests and focus these capabilities on dealing
with them.
Today, we are as a nation challenged at many levels. This morning I will
review these challenges and indicate where and how over the last year we've
developed new perceptions on their nature and how they might be dealt with.
In many of these areas government can't see and do everything and you in the
private sector have perceptions and capabilities that can be very important.
The most potentially devastating challenge comes from the nuclear missiles
which are aimed at us. The President will address that threat on Sunday so
I'll pass this morning.
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The second threat comes from the land, air and sea forces of the Warsaw
Pact nations in Europe. They have been gaining on NATO forces in quantity and
quality. On meeting that threat, I will defer to Secretary Carlucci.
The third threat is the ability of the Soviets, directly or through
proxies, to project power southward towards the oil fields and long sought
warm water ports of Southwest Asia. We've seen this in the invasion of
Afghanistan, in troop strength on the border and headquarters exercises into
Iran and in the linking up of Soviet weapons and air transport with Cuban
troops thousands of miles from their borders in Angola and Ethiopia. In
Southeast Asia, Soviet weapons, training and money have enabled Vietnam to
impose its will on both Laos and Cambodia.
The fourth. level of threat is. that of surreptitious expansion or creeping
imperialism. If you color in red a map of the world the nations under some
degree of Soviet influence, close to 50 nations will be in red. Ten years
ago, only 25 nations would. have been colored in red. In the ten years
between 1972 and 1982, 4 nations have extricated themselves from Soviet grasp
and 23 nations have fallen under a significantly increased degree of Soviet
influence or insurgency supported by the Soviets or their proxies. It is,
in my opinion, no coincidence that today the 11 insurgencies under way
throughout the world supported by Russia, Cuba, Libya and South Yemen happen
to be close to the natural resources and the choke points in the world's sea
lanes on which the United States and its allies must rely to fuel and supply
their economic life. For the Soviets, destabilization, subversion and the
backing of insurgents in other countries around the world has proven attractive
and relatively risk free. Moscow can deny involvement, label such conflicts
as internal, and warn self-righteously against "outside interference." It is
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much easier and much less expensive to support an insurgency than it is
for us and our friends to resist one. It takes relatively few people and
little support to disrupt the internal peace and economic stability of a small
country.
Production declines, investment is driven away and the resulting economic
dissatisfaction brings more recruits to the insurgent forces.
A fifth level of threat is in the exploitation of indigenous religious
.and political and other regional tensions. The most immediately dangerous
may be the Shia and Sunni Moslem tensions running through Iran, Iraq, Syria
and other states on the Persian Gulf which could bring heavy Soviet influence
into the oil regions of the Middle East. Similar tensions exist to be inflamed
and exploited between Arabs and Jews, between moderate and radical Arabs and
between blacks and whites in Africa. The Russians and Cubans are poised to
exploit tension between Gringos and Latinos in this. hemisphere if the Falklands
and other latent territorial disputes get out of hand.
Then there are lower level threats springing from an awesome range of
special Soviet capabilities. The first is their ability to get a free ride on
our research and development.
Only recently have we established how the accuracy, precision and power of
Soviet weapons, which we now must counter with budget busting appropriations,
are based on Western technology to a far greater extent than we had ever dreamed.
The Soviet political and military intelligence services, KGB and GRU, have for
years been training young scientists to target and roam the world to acquire
technology for their military arsenal from the US, Western Europe, Japan and
anywhere else. They have acquired technology worth many billions by purchase,
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legal and illegal, by theft, by espionage, by bribery, by scientific exchanges
and by exploiting our open literature and our Freedom of Information Act. We
need to sensitize and protect our scientists, engineers and sales forces
against technology pickpockets, dummy customers and forged papers used to
funnel sensitive equipment and knowledge behind the Iron Curtain.
The second is their skill in propaganda which continually puts us at
a disadvantage. While our intelligence has shown the Soviets carrying off
the biggest peacetime military buildup in history, deploying over 200 missiles
targeted at Western Europe and using chemical and bacteriological weapons
against the freedom fighters and their women and children in Afghanistan. and
--T-findo-China, they have succeeded in painting the United--States as a .threat to
-peace.
This is accomplished through their political and intelligence apparatus
in a far-flung and many-sided campaign of what they call active measures.
Our intelligence can identify the distortions of these active measures but
to develop the necessary instruments and links to expose and rebut them the
private sector in the free world will have to carry much of the load. That's
a challenge I put directly to you. Those who believe that our values and our
national security require a firm stance in the world need to involve some of
themselves and some of their money in educating and mobilizing public opinion
here and abroad. Right now Soviet propaganda and those in tune with it have
a clear field to mislead, divide and paralyze. There is a distinct limit to
what bureaucrats and politicians can do to counter this. The few tiny private
sector efforts to work this problem need to be strengthened, broadened and
reinvigorated. They need to be extended and linked with their counterparts
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abroad. There is a historic challenge here which can only be picked up by
by leaders in the private sector and I'll be glad to discuss it with any of
you later.
Another Soviet asset is military hardware advisors and training pumped
into Africa,. Asia and Latin America. The Soviets offer better prices, better
terms and better deliveries in providing weapons which bring Soviet influence
and advisors into Third World countries. We need to beef up our security
assistance and industrial military base to compete in this arena.
The increasing availability of money, arms and training for violence
has. created a monster known as international terrorism.
There is a new class of "violence manipulators" which will grow in
importance over the next few years. It includes: sub-national terrorist
groups, harbored willingly or unwillingly by various states, which seek to
disrupt Western societies; Third.World countries willing to exploit the tools
of terrorism directly for their own ends; and larger powers which desire to
manipulate international events without running the risks of formal military
confrontation.
None of these actors operates wholly independently. The Soviet Union
has provided funding and support for terrorist operations via Eastern Europe
and its client nations-like Libya or Cuba. With tacit Soviet approval many
groups have trained together in Cuba, Libya, Iraq, South Yemen and Lebanon.
Informal alliances among the members of different groups have often occurred.
Terrorism, on the whole, is too complex an issue to be easily explained
away as an example of Soviet interventionism. Even if the Soviet Union
withdrew all patronage, terrorist activity would certainly continue, perhaps
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unabated. Terror has other independent patrons, currently the most prominent
being Libya. Terrorist training camps are the largest industry in Libya,
next to oil.
Moreover, sub-national terrorist groups have matured into self-sustaining
organisms; there is no organic need for a master conspiracy. When enough
terrorists are armed and trained, they must kidnap and rob to get money for
what has become a big business and they need to assassinate and blow up things
to get the media spotlight they need to recruit and keep up morale.
The Intelligence Community works to identify these threats, to spot the
conditions which create vulnerability, and to diagnose and help develop the
capabilities needed to meet them. Subversion and insurgency exploit instability.
We have established a Center for the Study of Insurgency and Instability which
uses a wide range of techniques and methodologies to provide advance warning
of instability and potential for destabilization in order to protect us from
being caught by surprise as we were in Iran. The small and weak countries in
which insurgencies can be fostered and developed to overthrow governments do
not need and cannot handle expensive and sophisticated weapons for which
virtually all of them clamor. What they need is light arms to defend themselves
against externally trained and supported guerrillas, good intelligence, good
police methods, good communications, training in small arms and their use in
small unit actions, mobility to keep up with the hit-and-run tactics of guerrilla
forces. We can introduce an element of stability into the Third World by
helping small countries to develop those skills and capabilities for a fraction
of our foreign aid budget. Governments facing civil war cannot achieve economic
and social progress until they win the war.
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El Salvador provides an example of how we can help these beleaguered
nations to defend themselves. The training of El Salvadoran troops and officers
in the United States imparted new capabilities to the government Army. The
success of the recent elections in El Salvador came largely from developing
new intelligence sources and showing the El Salvadoran Army how to use
intelligence to break up guerrilla formations before they could attack
provincial capitals in order to stop the voting. This resulted in the
American television audience seeing in living color Usulatan, the provincial
capital nearest Nicaragua, with its streets empty and its inhabitants
huddled behind closed doors as guerrillas fired their rifles at doorways.
Then, a minute later, they saw in the rest of the country long lines of
people patiently waiting in the hot sun to cast their vote. That.contrast
in.a few minutes wiped out weeks of distortion about what is happening in
Central America. We are helping other countries threatened with subversion,
insurgency and terrorism to develop their own intelligence and counterinsurgency
capabilities and to track terrorist organizations and train local quick reaction
and rescue forces to fight terrorism worldwide.
In the final analysis, all these threats boil down to a struggle for the
hearts and minds of men. The courage of the Afghan freedom fighters, supported
by arms and training provided by other nations, escalates the price and deters
armed insurrection everywhere. The world has seen the Communist system fail
in Poland. The once proud call of Lenin, "Workers of the world unite," today
makes those in the Kremlin tremble. Many Third World countries have tried the
Communist model and discovered that it doesn't work. The Soviets have been
kicked out of Egypt, Sudan and Somalia. But to hold their people, leaders in
these harrassed countries needed to show that ties with the West do yield
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economic benefits. Even a modest Western presence enhancing their trade and
production and creating some jobs is all that they need to point to. Here the
American private sector can play a far more significant role than government
aid. What is needed in the Third World is not steel mills and power plants
but entrepreneurial activity suited to the prevailing level of..economic oppor-
tunity. That's the vision which President Reagan projected at the Cancun
Summit. We now need private sector leadership to encourage and show American
small and medium-sized business to move offshore and involve themselves in
the world.
The Intelligence Commuity has focused attention on the enormous economic
problems which the Soviets are facing at home. Assessments have been produced
on Soviet economic dependency on Western trade, on Soviet. military use of
Western technology, on the need for Western credits and energy markets to
save the Soviets from a devastating hard currency squeeze in the years
immediately ahead, on how forces in the global economy are likely to impact
our competitive position, our balance of payments, our capital formation
and the industrial base on which our national security must rest. These
are some of the ways intelligence can protect both our national security and
economic interest from threats emanating from external sources.
One concluding thought -- we have a propensity for shooting ourselves in
the foot. One of these self-inflicted wounds, close to my heart, leaves us
the only country in the world which gives foreign intelligence agencies and
anyone else a legal license to poke into our files. I question very seriously
whether a secret intelligence agency and the Freedom of Information Act can
co-exist for very long. The willingness of foreign intelligence services to
share information and rely on us fully, and of individuals to risk their lives
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and reputations to help us will continue to dwindle away unless we get rid of
the Freedom of Information Act. Secrecy is essential to any intelligence
organization. Ironically, secrecy is accepted without protest in many areas
of our society. Physicians, lawyers, clergymen, grand juries, journalists,
income tax returns, crop futures -- all have confidential aspects protected by
law. Why should national security information be entitled to any less protection?
I'm not asking for any retreat from our commitment to protecting essential
liberties but only to bear in mind, as Justice Goldberg once said, that "while
the Constitution protects against invasions of individual rights, it is not a
suicide pact."
Thank you -- I'll be glad to take your questions now or later.