ADMIRAL STANSFIELD TURNER INTERVIEWED

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00418R000100360001-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 10, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: June 12, 1991
• Content Type: MISC

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
PROGRAM World Day STATION CNN-TV
DATE June 12, 1991 10:00 A.M. CITY Washington, D.C.
REID COLLINS: Well, there are more encouraging signs
today the release of some Western hostages in Lebanon might be
happening int he near future. Winding up a four-day fact-finding
mission to that region, the British Foreign Office minister
Douglas Hogg said he has a feeling the hostage chapter may be
coming to a conclusion.. And a leading Iranian newspaper also
predicts that several U.S. hostages may be freed soon on humani-
tarian grounds.
Here to discuss the hostage situation and the role of
the Central Intelligence Agency in terrorism in general is
Stansfield Turner, Admiral Turner, the former CIA Director, also
the author of "Terrorism and Democracy," a book that considers
the failed and successful policies of some eight Presidents in
dealing with terrorism.
Admiral Turner, we appreciate very much your being here.
What do you make of the current rumors again extant that
some hostages may be getting out?
ADMIRAL STANSFIELD TURNER: Oh, I think it looks very
favorable. I don't believe they're all going to get out at once
or quickly, because these things seem to always protract them-
selves.
An interesting and key point here, which I make in my
book, in particular, Reid, is that we do make deals with terror-
ists. There's a lot of talk in this country that we should never
do that, but seven of the eight Presidents I surveyed did make
deals or condone deals with terrorists. You have to judge
whether it's an acceptable or an unacceptable deal.
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I think what's in the making here would be barely
acceptable. To wit, we will encourage the Israelis to release
some prisoners from their jails, in return for which the hostages
will come out of Lebanon.
COLLINS: Sheik Obeid, maybe somebody of that character,
may be released?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Yes, but they're talking even larger
numbers. He's one very key person, but there are three or four
hundred other Palestinians and Lebanese in the jails there. And
those seem to give the Israelis a little more problem.
But at the same time, we're in such strained relations
with Israel, that I think they may be willing to do this for us
to sort of ease the tensions overall.
COLLINS: Isn't there usually also an exchange of plain
old hard cash?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Not too often, I don't think. It ]iri
happen with Jimmy Carter, and that's where we had frozen $H
billion of Iranian money and we gave some eight billion of i'
back to them. That was a cash deal, in a sense, but it w.,;
Iranian cash we were giving back that we had frozen after Ui
took our hostages.
COLLINS: And in your administration -- and you wer,
then CIA Director -- there was a question of the legality of tnd'
whole thing in the beginning, the freezing of the cash, wasn't
there?
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, only a portion of it. The assets
of Iran that were held by U.S. banks in their overseas branches
were not covered by U.S. law. And the other countries said, "We
don't think we're allowed to do this." Fortunately, those other
countries were very nice about this and they said, "But we'll put
it in our court process to determine." And, of course, that
dragged out and out and we never came to a resolution of it.
I believe the freezing inside the United States
was
perfectly legal.
COLLINS: All right. In your book you say you
have
some
things included this time that in a previous book you
wrote
the
CIA's Director at the time wouldn't allow you to print.
What
are
the new things?
ADMIRAL TURNER: These were the CIA's role in supporting
the rescue operation in Iran, flying an airplane into the desert
and landing by the light of the moon to find out whether we could
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make this a temporary airfield, and the CIA's actual conduct of
the rescue of six Americans who escaped from the embassy when it
was captured and took refuge in the Canadian Embassy. The CIA
got more reasonable over the intervening years.
COLLINS: All right. So in the new book we find out the
CIA penetrated Teheran rather extensively. You had a lot of
people working for you.
ADMIRAL TURNER: I was buying trucks and warehouses and
all kinds of things to prepare for the rescue effort.
COLLINS: All right. And the rescue effort, as we know,
was dependent largely upon the work of eight helicopters,
seaborne kind of anti-submarine, anti-mine helicopters flown by
Marines, not by Delta Force peoplel, an admixture of people that
you say may have led to the downfall. Tell me why.
ADMIRAL TURNER:
I
think the fundamental problem with
that rescue operation
is
that we, admirals and generals like
myself, since the end
of
World War II haven't paid enough
attention to this kind
of
lower level of warfare. We've been
,
justifiably, understandably concerned with nuclear war, with
defense of Europe, big kinds of engagements. But we also shoulri
have been putting a small amount of effort on this kind of
activity. It was too small, what we did, in terms of training
and preparing. We could have had helicopters that would not have
to have refueled in order to get to Teheran. That was doable.
That was within the state of the art. We hadn't anticipated that
kind of situation.
COLLINS: All right. And you say you start out with
eight. You lost three due to mechanical troubles or decisions by
their commanders that they wouldn't work. But you suggest you
could have gone on with the five remaining.
ADMIRAL TURNER: Well, I think there were several ways
to have gone on. And all three of the helicopters that did not
go were flyable right to the end. Two of them were flyable at
some kind of a risk. They might have crashed and we'd have lost
some lives. But I think the commander on the scene had the
option of either going with five or of taking a sixth one along
that was flyable at a risk. And if it crashed and he lost some
people, that would have been unfortunate. But if it had got
through, then he could have had enough there to do the job. If
he had not got through, if it had crashed, he had the option then
of taking the rest of them and retreating the next night, coming
back out. You see what I mean? So that it wasn't an irrevocable
commitment if he had gone on and not had enough because the one
helicopter crashed.
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COLLINS: I want to ask you in a minute, when we come
back, why, in your opinion, they did not go on, what the psyche
of quitting was in those days. And perhaps a little bit about
the story that still floats about, primarily authored by Gary
Sick, bout what the Administration may or may not have had to do
with Desert One.
COLLINS: You suggest in the book a possible post-
Vietnam psychological military reason why helicopter commanders
may not be willing to take that extra mile, gung-hoism. What is
it?
ADMIRAL TURNER: I think that we didn't get them up on
the step enough. I don't think, because the mission was so
secretive, that there was a lot of gung-ho. Except it was
gung-ho in the Delta Force. But the commander of the overall
operation forgot about these helicopter pilots being just as
critical to his mission as the troops who were going to storm the
embassy. And I don't think he motivated them as much.
superior.
ADMIRAL TURNER: And General Vaught, his overall
And overall, I think the other problem is simply that,
the helicopter pilots were always under pressure to be ready
tomorrow, and they never had the time to train and be thorough iri
their preparation, as we would have hoped.
COLLINS: Had they gone on, had the embassy been
attacked, had the rescue force flown in to an air base that was
to have been taken, etcetera, would it have worked?
ADMIRAL TURNER: I think it could have worked. And
obviously all of us who were involved in it did, or we wouldn't
have recommended it to the President. There were risks at every
stage, but I think the Iranian people defending the embassy were
amateurs. They weren't really trained soldiers. I think the
surprise we would have brought to the situation would have
overwhelmed them in just a matter of minutes, and we would have
been able to pull it off.
But you have to acknowledge that at each step -- and
there were two more crucial steps to go after the one we failed
on -- it could have broken down, also.
COLLINS: You, above all people who have ever sat in
this room, should know the truth or the consequences, or what-
ever, of the Gary Sick suspicion, let's call it, that there was a
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political motivation on the part of people in support of
now-President Bush and then-to-be-President Reagan to see the
hostage situation unresolved during the 1980 campaign. Do you
believe the thrust of the Sick story?
ADMIRAL TURNER: I think Gary has added enough circum-
stantial evidence here that we've got to take it seriously. And
there are three situations which President Bush could dispel
right away if he wanted to and made the effort. And I think it's
important to him and to the country that he do that. It's the
accusation that he went to Paris and negotiated this deal just
two weeks before the presidential election. Well, surely the
Secret Service have records of where the vice presidential
candidate was.
ADMIRAL TURNER: He has denied it but he has not
produced the hard evidence. And even in a court case, when they
sent some Secret Service people, they failed to bring any kinds
of documents or proof.
Similarly, the accusation is Mr. Casey was in Paris;
and our present Ambassador to Korea, Donald Gregg, who was then a
CIA employee. And there are records about where peoplel like
that were, also.
COLLINS: You were the Director in the CIA. Didn't you
know? Didn't you know where all the ducks were?
ADMIRAL TURNER: I did not know where all the ducks
were, in this case. Gregg wasn't really working for me at the
CIA. He was working down at the White House at the time, on loan
from the CIA. And we just don't spys on Americans that much.
We're not allowed to. So it wasn't our job to keep track of
where Mr. Bush and Mr. Casey and people were.
But nonetheless, this can easily be cleared up. And I
think it's important for the White House that they do clear it
up. It's important for the country.
COLLINS: All right. Let's round this discussion around
to the hostage, Lebanon situation. Why hasn't there been any
employment of the Delta Force in their behalf?
ADMIRAL TURNER: My understanding is that the intelli-
gence people can't tell them precisely where the hostages are.
Ronald Reagan made that comment the day before he left office.
He said, "We never have known where the hostages are located."
It's just too difficult a job for the intelligence people to
penetrate those fanatical, small terrorist organizations that are
holding them.
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COLLINS: Some people say the job was made more diffi-
cult by the fact that you canned a lot of people when you were
there.
ADMIRAL TURNER: We didn't can one person overseas. We
didn't reduce one person from the operating end of the CIA. We
reduced overhead in the headquarters, which was hurting the
operations overseas, not helping.
COLLINS: All right, sir. That's the time we have for a
big subject that, in fact, encircles the globe and involves a
great many people.
We've been talking with the former Director of the CIA,
Admiral Stansfield Turner. Admiral Turner is the author of the
new book, "Terrorism and Democracy." Worth a read.
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