THE CIA/HARRY ROSITZKE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000201210003-1
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 21, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 21, 2008
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: May 21, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS STAFF
DATE May 21, 1984 12:00 Noon CITY Atlanta, Ga.
SUBJECT The CIA/Harry Rositzke
DON FARMER: Our subject now is the Central Intelligence
Agency, a villain to some, one of America's greatest defenses to
others. The CIA, initials known around the world. In a moment
we will talk about the CIA and how it compares and contrasts with
the Soviet KGB. Our guest will be the former CIA man who spent a
career watching the KGB in action, Harry Rositzke.
First we offer you the first of three reports on the CIA
now from CNN correspondent Gene Randall.
GENE RANDALL: CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia,
outside Washington, home base for an estimated 18,000 employees.
The agency's yearly budget thought to top $1.5 billion.
The CIA's primary job, the routine collection and
analysis of foreign intelligence for the nation's policymakers.
Not exactly the stuff of spy novels. It even prints maps
available to the general public.
But in 1980 presidential candidate Ronald Reagan
campaigned on a pledge to improve the CIA's ability to conduct
covert operations. Administration critic Morton Halperin says
the result is an agency that has been unleashed.
MORTON HALPERIN: What the CIA has been unleashed to do
is to go about the world looking for places where secret American
intervention in support of groups trying to overthrow governments
or in other ways to disrupt governments is possibly a useful
thing to do, to bring those proposals to the President, who in
turn has on a number of occasions authorized them to do that.
RANDALL: The United States is supporting 10 to 15
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thousand Contras in Central America, armed bands intent on
overthrowing the Marxist Sandinista regime of Nicaragua, support
which has included the mining of three Nicaraguan harbors.
With Reagan's longtime friend William Casey in charge,
the CIA has resurrected the image of a rogue elephant running
wild. Onetime CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline says the image is
not based on facts.
RAY CLINE: I think there was not in the '70s and there
is not now any trace of the rogue elephant. I think covert
operations are completely in control.
RANDALL: The history of CIA covert operations goes as
far back as the history of the agency itself. Established by
President Harry Truman in 1947, the CIA was a successor to the
Office of Strategic Services, the OSS of World War II. An early
success, the CIA's influence on the 1948 Italian elections, when
the Communist Party was defeated.
By the early '50s, under the Eisenhower Administration,
covert action was in its heyday. The CIA was involved in
toppling established governments. In 1953 the agency engineered
the restoration of the Shah of Iran to the Peacock Throne. The
next year, the leftist regime of Guatemala was overthrown. In
1956 there was a CIA effort to bring down the government of
Indonesia's President Sukarno.
1969 brought the Bay of Pigs invasion. Much of the
planning was carried out under Eisenhower, the failed mission
itself under John Kennedy.
Former CIA Director William Colby:
WILLIAM COLBY: The wiser covert actions -- and we've
had a lot of them -- are long-term in nature. The ones that have
not been so wise have been attempts at a quick answer. The quick
fix of the Bay of Pigs was a quick-fix answer, and it failed.
RANDALL: The CIA is just one element of the nation's
intelligence community. Information collection and analysis is
also performed by the Defense Intellgence Agency, the National
Security Agency, all four services, the Treasury Department, the
Department of Energy, and the State Department. The Director of
the CIA is, however, the primary adviser to the President and the
National Security Council on national intelligence matters. And
the CIA is the only one mandated to perform covert activity.
And as in Chile in the early '70s, when the agency
attempted to undo the government of Salvador Allende, in
Nicaragua today, it is the covert action that causes the CIA
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most of its problems.
In 1975 the late Frank Church led a Senate investigation
into CIA abuses of power, including illegal surveillance in the
United States. The committee recommended that covert operations
should never be routine, that the CIA should use them only in
extraordinary circumstances. Two congressional oversight
committees were set up.
CIA morale got worse under the Carter Administration.
Beginning in 1977, more than 800 covert operators were fired.
Hundreds of others quit over the next few years.
Then-agency director Stansfield Turner said he was
getting rid of the deadwood.
ADMIRAL STANSFIELD TURNER: When I left, there was a
very full and ample group of covert activities.
RANDALL: Senior American intelligence officials say,-in
constant dollars, the CIA has been restored to what it was in the
early '70s, that morale has also been restored.
What is missing from this report and those that will
follow is an interview with CIA Director William Casey. A
spokesman told us he would not be available, that Casey never
grants radio or television interviews.
In our next report we'll examine the issue of how covert
actions by the CIA can be reconciled with the norms of a demo-
cratic society.
FARMER: Now, the CIA versus the KGB. Our guest is the
author of a recent book on the Russians called Managing Moscow,
an analysis of what he calls the true nature of the long-term
Soviet threat. We're happy to welcome to Take Two today Harry
Rositzke. Mr. Rositzke was one of the first employees of the CIA
after World War II. He joins us now live.
Thank you, sir, for being with us today.
HARRY ROSITZKE: I enjoy it.
FARMER: In what ways are the CIA and the KGB alike,
first of all?
ROSITZKE: Well, both of them are large-scale, global,
secret intelligence outfits. KGB officers, CIA officers are in
most of the capitals of the world. And for both of them, the
main job is not covert action, not getting regimes in or out, but
to actually collect secret intelligence.
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In this respect, the KGB has an easy task, compared with
the CIA. They have over a thousand officers in Western Europe,
in New York, San Francisco and Washington. Our open societies
are easy pickings for them. They can meet anybody they want
anytime they want. And that's the first step toward recruiting
an agent.
When we look at our job in Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union, we can barely go around the corner without having a lot of
flat feet following us.
FARMER: Explain to me -- because of Gene Randall's
report, which has some emphasis on the controversy over covert
activity by the CIA -- is there such a thing as overt [sic]
activity by the KGB? Do these terms mean the same thing to the
different agencies?
ROSITZKE: No. The word covert is an American term.
And what it really means is an action can be completely open,
such as the Bay of Pigs or, to a certain extent, the mining of
the Nicaraguan harbors; but CIA's job and the reason it's given
the job is to help the President deny any official connection
with the action.
Well, that got to be fairly ludicrous after the Bay of
Pigs. It is now fairly ludicrous as the covert action, so-
called, in Nicaragua is debated on the floor of Congress and the
House has to appropriate funds for it.
So, to a certain extent, all we can say now is that the
so-called covert action operations have become overt. And as I
have recently recommended, why not let them be done by the
Department of Defense, who have all the facilities for the kind
of paramilitary work that's involved?
FARMER: You mean having them done publicly?
ROSITZKE: Well, quietly, but not with the intervention
of a secret agency.
FARMER: Why not?
ROSITZKE: Because the actual work on the ground
obviously is training the Contras and supplying them with
weapons. That can be done by some Army Rangers out of uniform
just as efficiently as CIA; and, in effect, let the CIA get back
to its normal business, which is secret operations, not semi-
open.
CHRIS CURLE: You said a little bit earlier that the
KGB, the agents are looking for secret intelligence or secret
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information. Give us an idea of the type of information that
they are seeking in the West, in this country, and the sorts of
things that maybe the comparable CIA agent would be wanting to
find out from the East.
ROSITZKE: Well, the KGB in the United States, for
example -- and I worked for the Bureau for three years in the
'60s on Soviet officials in Washington and New York. Our best
guess was that 80 or 85 percent of their effort was directed at
securing high-technology information that could not be gotten
through the normal means. And that meant recruiting agents, such
as in Hughes Aircraft. It means smuggling out components of
computers that cannot be transferred to the Soviet Union. It
means having West European firms buy equipment here and then, in
Brussels or Vienna, transshipping it to Warsaw or Moscow.
Now, on the other hand, what we want from the Soviet
Union really has been taken care of by our so-called National
Security Agency. We want early warning of military action and
keeping track of every missile silo, etcetera, inside. That's
now done by overhead satellites, by photography, by electronic
intervenion.
So, to that extent, we no longer have the job we had
when I started in this business, which was getting agents into
the Soviet Union to see whether or not they were going to start a
war.
FARMER: One of our colleagues just handed us a wire
service report that two Soviet agents have been arrested in
Brussels over the weekend while trying to obtain classified NATO
documents. I assume that's a fairly routine thing.
How much of that goes on that we never hear about? And
this is only going to be a couple of paragraphs in the paper, I
suppose.
ROSITZKE: Yeah. But on the NATO business, the NATO
obviously is the most immediate military threat to the Russians,
and they've been concentrating on that target for the last 25
years. There are a lot of different nationals in NATO, which
makes the job easier. And I would say that probably 40, 50 or 60
NATO agents, many of them in place for eight, ten or 12 years,
have been publicly arrested and tried in Germany, in France, and
in Brussels.
So, this is almost part of their routine approach. And
I would suggest that NATO, in that sense, is a complete sieve,
and the Russians have no problem getting at almost anything they
want to inside their headquarters.
CURLE: The image we have of the KGB probably mostly
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comes from spy novels and that sort of thing, but we have the
image of them not only working around the world, but also having
tremendous control or influence or effect, at least, within the
Soviet Union.
What is the objective of the KGB within its own country?
ROSITZKE: Well, one part of the KGB, and probably the
chief part, from the point of view of the Politburo, is the
Second Chief Directorate, which is the domestic security service.
That guarantees the Politburo that whatever happens in the Soviet
Union, there will never be a degree of dissidence or anti-
government action that the KGB doesn't get their hands on very,
very quickly. They're the guarantor, really, of the party's
retention of power in the Soviet Union.
FARMER: How much of the spy-novel mystique is real?
That is to say, you always read about a KGB agent and a CIA agent
who know each other, they've sort of bumped into each other over
the years, and they respect each other for what they do, they're
the brotherhood and all of that. How much of that is nonsense,
and is there any truth to it?
ROSITZKE: I think most of it is kind of romantic
nonsense. In the first place, any spy novel I've seen, outside
of the early novels of Carre, are really adventures stories.
They have nothing whatever to do with espionage or counter-
espionage, because any CIA or KGB man who becomes conspicuous,
who carries a gun, who is caught carrying a gun, who meets
ravishing blondes around the corner, by definition, they are not
secret operators. And therefore, the noisy, the conspicuous, the
action simply kills espionage.
All the real espionage work is done either in dark rooms
or dark corners with no one looking.
FARMER: Mr. Rositzke, we're out of time. In ten
seconds, is it a good life being a CIA agent, or not?
ROSITZKE: It's been a very satisfactory life.
FARMER: We thank you for your book and we thank you for
your intelligence information you've passed along. I'm kidding.
Thank you for all the help you gave us today in understanding the
CIA and the KGB. Thank you, sir.
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