INTERVIEW WITH STANSFIELD TURNER

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000301800002-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 21, 2010
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: July 18, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
The Merv Griffin Show WTTG-TV
PROGRAM STATION Syndicated
DATE July 18, 1985 9:00 P.M. CITY Washington, D.C.
MERV GRIFFIN: My next guest is a former Navy Admiral
who served as Director of the CIA under President Carter from
1977 to 1981. He's critical of the way the Agency's run today,
and outlines his observations in his new book, Secrecy and
Democracy: The CIA in Transition. He also plays a mean game of
tennis.
Would you help me in welcoming Stansfield Turner?
[Applause]
GRIFFIN: You got your pants on right?
ADMIRAL STANSFIELD TURNER: Well, you know, Merv, the
last time when we played tennis, I fell down so much, I had holes
in the knees. And when I turned it around to keep my knees from
freezing, you accused me of trying to deceive you and make you
think I was running backwards.
GRIFFIN: Well, we played against each other when he was
Director of the CIA. And, of course, the first intimdating thing
is he arrived with bodyguards, who stood in the corner of the
thing. And you don't want to serve to hard with a guy with a
bodyguard.
ADMIRAL TURNER: And secret tennis balls.
GRIFFIN: And secret tennis balls, right, that were
wired for sound. And he walked out on the court with his pants
on backward. Now, to which I said, "Mr. Director, is that a
problem in the CIA?" He gave me a very dirty look.
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ADMIRAL TURNER: We're pretty backward people.
GRIFFIN: Well, you did take an awful lot of kidding. I
think Carl Reiner said to you, "Well, he wants to see where he's
been."
[Laughter]
GRIFFIN: He got kidded the whole weekend on that.
ADMIRAL TURNER: The worst part was I lost to you, Merv.
That's all I cared about.
GRIFFIN: I had a heck of a -- Jimmy Connors hits a good
ball. He was my partner.
Coming from a military background, Mr. Turner, what did
you perceive the CIA to be?
GRIFFIN: Well, when I first arrived in 1977, it was
right after the major investigations in 1975-76 in which some
past errors and abuses were revealed. And I found it was an
agency hunkering down. The professionals were conscientious.
They didn't want to take any more risks, lest they get in
trouble. And my problem was, you have to take risks to do
intelligence. So I had to encourage them back into risk-taking,
but at the same time insure it didn't get out of control and
they'd get into trouble and errors again.
GRIFFIN: Right.
There are an awful lot of intelligence agencies in
Washington that seem to be bumping into each other. You have
Army Intelligence, Navy Intelligence, FBI, CIA, Marine
Intelligence. I'm sure there's some other intelligence in
Washington.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, there are a few intelligent
people, too.
[Laughter]
GRIFFIN: There are an awful lot of intelligence
agencies. And, of course, you have the Congress, who has a...
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, we have 12 different intelligence
agencies. I think we do need most of them. I'd like to do away
with the Army, Navy and Air Force and put it all in one, which we
have already in the Defense Intelligence Agency.
You need some competition because you and John and I
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will all come to different conclusions from the same facts. And
we need to have people looking at things differently to be sure
we don't overlook something important.
GRIFFIN: But aren't you liable to all bump each other
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well...
GRIFFIN: "Gee, I didn't know you're a spy."
"Oh yes, I do."
ADMIRAL TURNER: There is a problem if there is too much
competition. We find some of the agencies don't share everything
with the others. Some of them go out and put things on the
street ahead of time, before they have checked with other people.
And I'd like to see that competition narrowed. And I've made
some recommendations in my book for how to do that.
GRIFFIN: In the time that you served as Director,
didn't we have, though, some major problems, like the Russians
walking into Afghanistan?
ADMIRAL TURNER: We predicted that.
GRIFFIN: You did predict that.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Yes.
GRIFFIN: What about the hostages that were held in
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, the whole Iranian situation, we
didn't do as well as we should have. But we did let people know
that the Shah was in a lot of trouble over there. The big
problem was we made one bad assumption. We assumed that because
the Shah had such an enormous army and police power, that even if
this dissidence built up, that he'd step in and knock it down, he
would not let them take his throne away.
Merv, he didn't do that. And we'll never know why.
Maybe he was so out of touch with his country that he didn't
realize how deeply he was in trouble. Maybe, Merv, the doctors
had told him he was a dying man, and he couldn't face the tough
decision.
But we missed in that assumption, which seemed realistic
at the time, proved to be wrong.
GRIFFIN: Do you want to jump in here, John?
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JOHN CHANCELLOR: I want to jump in here and say
something about what Admiral Turner did as Director of Central
Intelligence.
I don't think you've been given enough credit for it.
And that is that a lot of people think of the CIA as
cloak-and-dagger spies, assassinations, poison, things like that.
The fact is that the CIA is one of the most brilliant research
and analysis organizations in the world. And I don't know, half
of those people who work in Langley have never -- don't know what
a dirty trick is. But they can predict with great accuracy who's
going to be hungry in the world, what political changes are going
to be made.
When Admiral Turner was the Director of Central
Intelligence, he began to open the Agency up to people like me,
to the press. You made -- we got maps from the CIA. I still
have an atlas of the polar regions that says "CIA" on it that I
kept on top of the coffee table for months because it looked so
secret and marvelous.
ADMIRAL TURNER: And there are a lot of secrets at the
South Pole.
CHANCELLOR: Well, plus the fact is that you brought a
lot of air into it. And I think for many of the people who work
there, you began to redeem their reputation, because it had been
in trouble before. And the CIA has a lot of very distinguished
scholars and scientists on its staff, and I think their
reputation was helped.
And he certainly made life easier for people like me.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Thank you, John.
But in addition, what we were trying to do was to reduce
the amount of classified information in the whole government.
And this recent Walker case shows that there's just too much of
that classified information out there, and people don't respect
the label. It says secret, and then they read it in the
newspaper the next day and they say, "Well, it isn't really
secret," and they forget about it and talk about it. And pretty
soon some real secrets are out there in the public that should
not be.
GRIFFIN: We'll return right after these commercial
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GRIFFIN: What's Mr. Reagan done wrong?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, I don't know whether he's running
intelligence well or not. But I do know that almost every day
for the last four years you read something in the newspapers
saying the CIA is out of control, the CIA is doing illegal or
unethical things in Nicaragua, in Beirut, that it's politicizing
the intelligence product.
Now, whether those are correct or not, if the public and
the Congress gain the impression that the CIA is not performing
properly, we're going to be back to 1975-76. The CIA is going to
be hurt badly again.
GRIFFIN: If too much is out in the open, don't you play
into the hands of the Soviets?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, there's no need to put too much
out in the open. If you have a philosophy, as I think the
present Administration does, of trying to keep everything secret,
you don't keep anything secret, because people, as I say, don't
respect it. But you can narrow down what are the real secrets,
and set those over here and try to protect them; let the rest of
it come out into the public, and you'll protect these others
better.
CHANCELLOR: Also, I think you avoid the problem that
this Administration and others have had, and that is denying
things to the Americans which the Russians know all about.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, that's true. And in my book,
they wouldn't let me publish a speech that I made to the alumni
of Vassar College when I was Director of Central Intelligence.
Now, that's sort of ridiculous.
CHANCELLOR: You submitted the book, you submitted the
manuscript to the CIA, and they said, "No, you can't use the
Vassar speech."
GRIFFIN: But one of the girls has a book coming out
[Laughter]
GRIFFIN: It's true what John says, that the public,
because of motion pictures and television and Broadway plays and
-- the CIA is always pictured as assassins. But we did deal in
that for a while, didn't we? We did assassinate leaders.
ADMIRAL TURNER: No. There is a record of their having
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plotted and thought about some assassinations. They never
carried one out.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, they didn't do any assassination
there. That was a policy of the Kennedy Administration to
withdraw support from Diem, but not the CIA.
And President Ford in 1976 issued an order that says
there'll be no assassinations by our government. President
Carter reaffirmed this. President Reagan has reaffirmed that.
And I think that's a good policy.
GRIFFIN: So, as Director, you know of no assassinations
by the CIA.
ADMIRAL TURNER: That's correct. I can, of course, only
certify for the four years I was there. But what I've read of
the history, I don't believe there ever were any carried out by
the CIA.
GRIFFIN: This is a fascinating book, and it's called
Secrecy and DDemocracy: The CIA in Transition, by Admiral
Stansfield Turner.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Thank you, Merv. And nice to see you
again.
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