THE CIA'S ORDEAL DURING THE '70S MADE IT STRONGER

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00418R000100150025-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 15, 2012
• Sequence Number: 25
• Publication Date: January 22, 1989
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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STAT
The Washington Post
The New York Times
The Washington Times
The Wall Street Journal
The Christian Science Monitor
The CIA's ordeal during the '70s made it stronger New York Daily News
USA Today
The Chicago Tribune
,SAN DIEG0 LIN
Date 2.2. ZAN icra,
Q?SL
William E.. Coll).
formcr k 6;1 CCIOr
Question: Mr. Colby, you were in
charge of the Central Intelligence
Agency at a very difficult time,
from 1973 to 1976. Do you think
the ordeal the CIA endured then
resulted in a weaker CIA, a stronger CIA,
or one that was minimally damaged?
Answer: I'd say all of the above. The
main issue was that we had to update the
relationship of CIA with the government
and Congress. Our CIA stemmed out of the
traditional, tiny spy service that serves the
president, king or prime minister and real-
ly doesn't have much else to do with the
government. We developed an intelligence
system which, with its analysts, technology,
contribution to policy-making, major oper-
ations around the world, was just too big to
fit into that mold, so we had to bring it into
a normal relationship with the separation
of powers under our Constitution. But we
did it with a high degree of sensationalism
and uproar, which, without question, hurt. It
caused a lot of foreigners to doubt that
Americans were really serious about these
things or could keep secrets. But we gave
the CIA a better base for future operations,
because now if the CIA gets involved in
something that biomes controversial, it's
pretty clear that'll acted with the support
of the president and Congress.
0: When you say operations, do you
mean covert operations?
A: Yes. Three examples out of the public
print obviously received general consensus
that they were a good idea: aid to the
Afghan rebels, aid to the Cambodian
resistance, and aid to Savimbi in Angola.
None of these was terribly secret, but none
caused much problem because there was a
consensus. There was not a consensus with
regard to the Contras in Nicaragua, and
we've had an enormous uproar about them.
0: Will the relatively new notification
requirements cause you any concern?
A: Some, but you have to do it. Congress
has taken a rather amusing position in
inserting in the rules that it will not have to
approve the operations, but it does say that
it has to be informed. That was not
adequately done in the Iran-Contra
instance. But the fact is that if they're
infoored they can stop actions, as they did
in Angola with the Boland amendments. By
not stopping them they essentially
acquiesce.
0: Isn't the flip side of that the danger
that a member of the intelligence
committee who strongly opposes a
covert operation can expose it to stop it?
A: It's possible, but he doesn't have to. I
had a conversation with a congressman one
time, and he asked, "What can we do when
you tell us and we don't like it?" I said.
"Congressman. you can do lots of things.
You can object to it and I will report your
objection to the president. You can get a
vote of the committee, and that will
certainly arouse attention. You can even
develop a resolution which essentially bars
the action, as in the Boland case. Or if the
director insists on going ahead, you can just
write down in his little notebook the figure
$30 million that's coming off his next year's
appropriation, and I guarantee that will
catch his attention.
0: How much leakage of secrets has
there been from these congressmen?
A: Not very much. Congressmen will tell
you that the executive leaks more than they
do, which isn't saying a lot. Newsmen
frequently will tell you that the major leaks
come out of the administration trying to
manipulate the press. Some things do leak
out, but that's a cost of running our kind of
government, and I think our kind of
government has enormous strengths that
compensate for those costs. I made a deal
with the chairman during the (1970s)
investigations. I said, "Look, I'm not going
to contest your constitutional right to know
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everything here because, that's going to get
us nowhere. But I am going to convince you
that there are certain things you don't need
to know and shouldn't know, primarily the
names of the people that work with us
around the world. You don't need those
names. I don't know them either, and I don't
want to know them, because I don't need to
know them." We made the deal and
conducted a year of civil investigations
without names.
0: To what extent did the "scandals"
of the 19704 damage the CIA's
information-sharing relationships with
other intelligence services around the
world?
k We had very clear situations where
foreign intelligence services began to clam
up. In other situations individuals who had
been our agents came to us and said they
couldn't work with us anymore because
they couldn't trust us to protect them and
their families. We did lose, but I don't think
this was a mortal wound to us.
0: How close is the relationship
between the director of the CIA and the
president?
k It depends on the director and on the
president. With Casey and Reagan it was
quite close. With Helms and Johnson,
Helms was a member of Johnson's so-called
"Tuesday lunch," in which about eight of
the senior officers in Defense, State and the
rest would gather once or twice a week to
coordinate the security effort In my case,
with Nixon, it wasn't terribly close. I saw
him when I had something important or in
a meeting, but he was inclined to work
through his staff, through Kissinger. With
Ford it was a little more frequent and more
normal.
0: What about Bush and Webster?
How do you feel about Bush's decision
to retain Webster?
A: I think it was a good thing to retain
him. I suspect that Bush, having been there,
knows the job very well and has respect for
what the agency can do. He also will be
conscious of the need to keep Congress
informed on what the agency is doing. I
think Bush approaches it as getting a team
to work together. He is not a great
ideologue ? he's not going to march out
with a flag flying all by himself.
0: Given the closeness between Casey
and President Reagan, are you
persuaded that Reagan had no
knowledge of the aid to the Contras
through the sale of weapons to Iran?
A: Here I speak from the public print
again. Mr. Reagan apparently started off
almost every meeting saying, "What can we
do more for the Contras, and what can we
do for our hostages?" That's going to
generate a certain amount of activity
among his subordinates ? you know, the
old Henry II thing of who will rid me of this
turbulent priest, and four of his knights go
over and slice up Thomas a Becket in
Canterbury Cathedral. Did the king ask for
it? No. Was it in line with what he wanted
to happen? Yes. I think the Tower
Commission was very accurate with
respect to Reagan's very relaxed
management style. He didn't want to know
the details. But I think he is responsible,
whether he knew the details or not.
0: Some argue that the prosecution of
Oliver North, Admiral Poindexter and
others amounts to a sort of political act,
if you will ? not simply ferreting out
suspected breakers of the law, but
criminalizing a difference between the
president and Congress on foreign
policy. What's your feeling on that?
A: There is a statute that puts it as "Thou
shalt not lie to Congress." That isn't what it
says exactly, but that's what it means. And
there are criminal penalties involved.
Anybody is under the gun of not lying to
Congress, and that's what Mr. North in his
immune testimony said he did. I think that
is totally unacceptable. You can't run a
government that way. Mr. Poindexter made
a point of not telling the president what he
was doing. What kind of subordinate is that?
0: At the end of the 19705 there were
some celebrated intelligence failures ?
for example, the failure in Iran to antici-
pate the Islamic revolution, the failure to
anticipate that the Soviets were prepar-
ing to invade Afghanistan. Would you
blame difficulties like those on the in-
vestigative process of the mid-'70s?
A: I wouldn't blame them fully on the
investigations, but I think they probably
had an influence. If you cuff a group of
people around for several years
continuously, you reduce their drive and,
certainly, their williness to take risks on
certain things.
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0: Which is a way of saying the morale
of the CIA declined as a result?
A: Sure it did. One of George Bush's
major contributions was that he picked
them up, put them back to work, and gave
them a sense of dignity and appreciation
for what they were doing. He is very highly
regarded for that within the CIA. As for the
Iranian thing, I think it wasn't a collection
problem but an analysis or perception
problem of the strength of the Islamic
fundamentalism. Certainly, the Ayatollah
made no secret of his intentions. I think the
agency was fairly well informed in its
psychological assessment of the shah, that
he really was not a very strong man and
wouldn't react all that well under pressure.
On the Afghan thing, I'm not sure you're
right. We saw the troops gathering at the
frontier, the troubles the Soviets were hav-
ing with their puppet regime, and we were
following it fairly carefully. I wasn't in it
then, so I'm just working off the press re-
ports, but the silly thing was President
Carter's remark ? at which I was absolute-
ly aghast ? that he had learned more about
the Soviets in the previous two weeks than
he ever knew before. That bespeaks a man
who never heard of Hungary or Czechoslo-
vakia ? it just doesn't make any sense.
0: To what extent have our problems
with developing a reliable launch
capability compromised our intelligence
gathering?
A: Again I am speaking totally off the
public print. As I understand it, we lucked
out after the Challenger disaster when
some of our devices lasted a little longer
than they were programmed to and got us
out of a bit of a jam. We're all right now,
apparently. We've got some new stuff up.
There was an argument in the early '70s as
to whether we ought to put all our eggs in
the space shuttle basket, and the decision
by the government at that time was that
the only way to justify the shuttle operation
was to put all our eggs in it. Some of the Air
Force and intelligence people did object at
the time and were overridden. Now we're
going back to having a variety of launch
vehicles, and I think that is the only way to
do it.
0: The debate over human intelligence
gathering versus advanced technology
seems to be increasing. Have humans
somehow been downgraded?
A: Yes and no. The technological
dimension of intelligence has revolutionized
the business in the last 25 years, and,
obviously, that changes the whole picture.
But does it mean that you don't need a
human agent to tell you something about
the internal political dynamics of the
Politburo? No, it doesn't. You need that if
you have a society that operates in secret
and those secrets can be dangerous to our
society.
0: What do you think is the proper
balance between collection of electronic
intelligence or technological intelli-
gence, collection of human intelligence
and use of covert or paramilitary opera-
tions.
A: It's hard to tell about the question of
human or technological. There is no way
you can put things up in the sky with any
precision without spending a lot of money.
With the human thing, you're not going to
spend that much money. It's training, it's
competent people, it's having them in
different parts of the world. The hardest
problem we face is cover. When we have a
society that says, "Thou shall not use
missionaries, thou shall not use journalists,
thou shall not use academics, thou shall not
use the Peace Corps, thou shall not use a
whole bundle of other people, who the hell
is left? ff you go abroad with a nice little
thing on your hatband saying "I am CIA,"
you're not going to accomplish very much.
Use of covert operations is going to respond
to an administration's attitude and to the
situation we face in the world ? if we face
a major threat and the administration
wants to respond to it, we'll have some big
projects. ff we don't face any threats we
probably won't do very much.
0: There have been reports that we
have relied on people like Manuel'
Noriega of Panama and, in the case of
Mexico, Miguel Nazar Hero, who was
head of the Federal Judicial Police and
was indicted for stealing cars in Los
Angeles. Is that a problem?
A: Noriega was the intelligence officer in
Panama, and so was Omar Torrijos before
him. Obviously, you're going to have some
relationship with him, and get what you
can. Does that mean you're going to depend
on him totally? No. You're going to develop
such other sources as you think you need
according to the importance of the
problem. As for the Mexican thing, I just
don't know enough about the man or the
details to answer.
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0: Without getting into details or going
beyond your knowledge, do we get so
tied up in folks like these that we can't
back off?
A: Obviously, you have to weigh some
counterveiling values one way or the other,
but the answer is no, we don't get totally
tied to them. But you're not going to run a
bunch of Boy Scouts around the world as
your agents. You'll have all sorts of people.
But particularly when you get into seamy
areas, you're going to need people who are
fairly seamy.
G: What can you tell us about CIA
recruiting. What sort of individuals does
the agency seek?
A: It depends on what their job is to be.
We have four basic career patterns. One is
science or technology, and we obviously
want very good engineers, electrical or
whatever kind are needed to work some of
these devices that we either send up in the
sky or use on the ground. Another category
is analysts who receive the information and
consider what it means. There you want
people with advanced degrees in history,
economics or something like that. Then
you've got administrators for personnel,
finance, logistics and so forth. And then
there are the operations types who go
abroad, get to know foreigners and speak
their language, and try to understand
what's happening.
0: There is an individual who was
trained by the CIA to work in the Soviet
Union despite some very strange things
in his personal history which the CIA
knew about. In the end, this individual
defected and Is now in the Soviet Union.
A lot of people wondered how the CIA
cfvild be seemingly so sloppy in its per-
sonnel practices. I know it didn't happen
on your watch, but how can you explain
something like that?
A: Let's remember the difficulty of cover,
particularly in going behind the Iron
Curtain. Obviously, you don't want people
who are identified as intelligence officers.
You want somebody whose background will
stand up to a hostile look. Now this guy had
no intelligence connection whatsoever. We
ran him through the tests and the polygraph
and learned that he had used drugs, but he
said he had stopped. Before he left we put
him through the polygraph again and it
bounced. He had continued to used drugs.
We said no, he's not going to the Soviet
Union because of that. Then the problem is
what do you do with him. We helped him
get a job in New Mexico, as I remember.
We offered him psychological counseling to
try to help him readjust He was bitter
about having been bounced, and finally he
decided to contact the Soviets. We were
tipped to his plans by Yurchenko, the
defector, but he slipped the FBI and ran
away. A bad show, yes, but let's get
something in perspective. Out of the 40
years of CIA history, that is our first
defector to the Soviet Union. That is not a
bad record.
0: How much harm did it do?
A: Apparently, and I don't know this for
sure, he did enough harm to finger an
officer in the Soviet Ministry of Aviation,
who was executed. That's quite a lot
0: You mentioned Yurchenko, which
leads to another question. Wasn't that
poorly handled by the CIA?
A: No. The fact is that any of these
defectors can just tell us they want to go
home and they go home. Were not going to
hold them here. Yurchenko was debriefed
and told us things like this other case and a
few other things quite significant And then,
like a number of defectors, he went through
a psychological crisis while we were doing
the usual process of trying to get him
adjusted to life here. He may have thought
that we operate like the KGB and wouldn't
let him go, so he ran away to the Soviet
embassy. If he wanted to go the Soviet
embassy all he had to do was say so.
0: What happens to a Yurchenko when
he goes back?
A: Yurchenko has been seen, I think, on
one, occasion in Moscow. I doubt that he's
going have a very high responsibility, but
one of the things he will do is give lectures
to fellow members of the KGB not to
defect, because the Americans will just
squeeze you and throw you away. I think
they will try to keep him alive, incidentally,
to knock off any accusations that they
execute such people.
0: In a case like Libya, you didn't
mention among intelligence objectives
any desire to see covert operations that
might foment Gadhafi's ouster.
A: I don't have any problem with it if you
can do it, but I'd be fairly careful about how
I did it. You can't beat something with noth-
ing. If you're going to bring about a change
like that ? or help bring it about, because
that's what you really do ? you have to find
somebody to help and build them up. That
takes a long time.
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0: Ws did that in Vietnam, didn't we?
A: No, that's what we didn't do. I'm just
finishing a book on Vietnam, I've spent a
long time over there. One of the things on
the Diem thing is that I don't remember a
serious conversation as to who would follow
him, which is just nutty. If you're going to
get rid of somebody, at least have some
idea who will take over. And how anyone
could have thought that the generals were
going to have a more democratic society
than good old Mandarin Diem I don't know.
I think the biggest disaster we had in Viet-
nam was the overthrow of Diem.
0: What also want wrong?
A: The overall approach was best ex-
pressed by Mac Bundy one time when I
said, "Look, why don't we stop talking about
what we're going to bomb and how many
soldiers we're going to send? Why don't we
talk about how we get the villages orga-
nized to resist the Viet Cong, because that's
the real problem. And he said I might be
right, but the structure of the American
government probably wouldn't allow that.
When we first got in trouble there in the
early '60s, we floundered around with a mil-
itary approach, and our military essentially
anticipated a revision of the Korean War,
which anybody who had read anything
about Ho Chi Minh or the French experi-
ence knew wasn't going to happen. That
was error one.
0: You mean in the way we advised
the South Vietamese and structured
their armed forces?
A: Yes. Our whole argument was to raise
the South Vietnamese army from 150,000 to
170,000. Meanwhile, the local forces, the ter-
ritorial forces, were about a total of 70,000
and there was no home guard. Now when
the British won in Malaya, they had about
80,000 troops, about 80,000 police and 400,000
home guards. Next came the strategic ham-
let program ? it didn't work all that well,
but at least it took the initiative of trying to
build something at the bottom. And then we
got mad at Diem, overthrew him and creat-
ed total chaos. Poor President Johnson had
no choice but either to accept defeat or
send in the American forces.
0: Then what happened?
A: When you send American forces into
something, they're going to look around for
the enemy ? to fight and finish the enemy.
But they couldn't find them because the
communist strategy was to avoid combat,
and just get at the populace. So we insisted
on fighting what was familiar to us, a sol-
diers' war, while the enemy was pulling the
rug out from under us. Eventually, we built
up our forces to 500,000. Finally, we got
ourselves cranked around, thanks to Presi-
dent Johnson, who put Robert Komer in to
get something going in what be called the
other war. Komer put together an organiza-
tion of civilians and military to conduct
pacification, and with that we increased the
territorials to about 400,000 and handed out
about 500,000 weapons to home guard,
changed the whole balance of force, and
proceeded to win. Then Tet came along and
was grossly misunderstood, because really
it was a communist defeat. But it turned
the American people off. President Nixon
had to get the troops out.
_se
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