ADMIRAL TURNER S ADDRESS TO THE LIONS CLUB LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00498R000200080008-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 12
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 29, 2007
• Sequence Number: 8
• Publication Date: April 12, 1978
• Content Type: REPORT

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Admiral Turner's Address to the Lions Club
Lexington, Kentucky - 12 April 1978
I am really very pleased to be here with you today. There is
nothing that does a bureaucrat from Washington so much good as to get out
of Washington and away from that Eastern seaboard where we really think
that everything we do and hear is the way people of the great country of
the United States really feel. It is good for us to get out where we do
find what the outlook of the country really is. What I would like to
discuss with you today is what I think the outlook of our country ought
to be today about its intelligence activities.
We all recognize that there's been almost three years of intense
public criticism of past intelligence activities; some of it justified,
much of it not. But today I'm optimistic because I feel, and I hope I'm
right, that there is a turning point here and that we're beginning to see
in the public response a constructive attitude towards not just criticizing,
but towards asking what do we need, what should we have, and how can we
have a good intelligence service in this country while still protecting
our American values, the Constitutional rights of our citizens and doing
this in a difficult atmosphere where we must, in the intelligence business,
do a lot of our work in secret. It's a difficult, interesting challenge.
I'd like to outline for you a couple of things we are doing today to try
to be more effective in the way we conduct our intelligence, and a couple
of things we're also doing to be sure that at the same time we protect these
American values and rights of our citizens.
First, to be more effective, we're putting great emphasis on
insuring that the product of American intelligence is really keyed to the
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needs of this country in the 1970s and 1980s--not to what we needed a few
years ago. I think today the need for good intelligence is greater than
it has ever been in the 30 years since we formed a central intelligence
organization for this country. For instance, if we look back 30 years at
our military position in the world, we all recall how dominant we were at
that time. And yet, since then, the Soviet Union, not being able to
compete with us politically or economically, has spent a great deal of its
effort in the one area where they felt they could compete--military power.
Today we find ourselves in a position something akin to military parity.
Now the difference here is that good intelligence of what enemy capabilities,
and perhaps intentions, are is much more important than the condition of
parity than one where we had tremendous superiority. It gives our decision
makers in peacetime and our military commanders in wartime great leverage
if they can understand better what the other side can do and might do.
Nobody gives these things away of course, but there are always clues that
are dropped here and there and we in the intelligence business must take
those clues, piece them together, and come up with advice and recommendations
to our policy makers.
But not only has the world changed in the military sphere, but
it changed in the political these last 30 years. For instance, 30 years
ago we were the dominant political power and most, or many at least, of
the smaller nations of the world took their cue from us. Today, the
smallest, the newest nation eschews domination by either the United States
or the Soviet Union; they go their own independent way as we appreciate
almost every day. I don't think that's necessarily bad, it's probably
very healthy. But what it means for us is that if we are to maintain our
role as the leading nation in the world of free nations, we must understand
the aspirations, the cultures, the attitudes, the outlooks of these many
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nations with whom we must deal. That takes good insight, good political
intelligence, much more important to us today than in the past when we
dominated this scene.
Much the same can be said about the world of economics. Thirty
years ago we were totally independent economically. It's almost a truism
today to talk about our interdependence and to point to the OPEC control
of the world energy, or at least oil energy, and so on as evidence of that
interdependence. So today, economic intelligence is of growing importance
to our policy makers because economic decisions made other countries--the
European Economic Community, Japan, the Soviet Union, and many others--can
have a tremendous affect on you and me, on our pocketbooks, on our economy
here in this country. Yet, in some of those, like the Soviet Union, those
critical economic decisions are made in great secrecy despite the impact
they will have on the entire world economic picture. So it is incumbent
upon us to increase our abilities in the economic intelligence sphere.
These are exciting challenges to us to expand our scope of intelligence
from just military to political and economic from what used to be a primary
focus on the Soviet Union to today's attention to many many more countries
with whom this nation does have good and legitimate business. Let me not
overstate this--good intelligence on the Soviet military threat is our
number one intelligence priority and must remain so. But we must today,
in your intelligence community, expand and be able to cope with the additional
dimensions of intelligence which I have just mentioned. And in doing that,
the second thing I'd like to mention is that we've changed our production
lines.
The standard production unit of intelligence throughout history
has been the human intelligence agent - the spy. You remember that Joshua
sent two other men to jericho before he marched around the walls. That
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same human intelligence agent has been the backbone of all intelligence
activities ever since; well, at least until a decade, or decade and a half
ago when we encountered a revolution in what we call technical means of
collecting intelligence. This is an exciting change to the way we produce
intelligence. Today, the quantities of data that flow in from these
technical collection sources is just vast. It boggles our ability to
handle it, to process it, to sort it, to figure out what is most important,
to keep track of it, to piece it together, to make a picture out of a bunch
of pieces of puzzle. Much the same is true I imagine at the University of
Kentucky campus across the city here, where information is just proliferating,
and I am sure the same is true in many of your businesses.
Interestingly, in my business, the advent of these technical
systems and this great flood of additional data has accented even more
than in Joshua's time, the importance of the human intelligence agent.
Why? Because when I go to a policy maker and say I've got a whole lot of
information here collected from technical means which tells you what
happened generally, yesterday or maybe today, in some foreign country, I'm
always asked a couple of questions: why did that happen and what's going
to happen tomorrow, why are they doing that? Well, that's the forte of
the human intelligence agent. So today our change in production line is
that we must integrate the human and the technical means of collecting
intelligence. We must bring them together as a team so they complement
each other, so that when we don't get the information from one or the other,
we put the other one to work on it and try to fill in those gaps. It's a
change in doing business, it really is. It's as though those of you in
the manufacturing industries here didn't put in a new production line with
many new pieces of machinery instead of relying simply on one basic, tried
process.
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While we're improving our product and our production line, we're
also doing things to insure that we conduct our intelligence business
within the bounds that the American public desires. First, we're following
a policy today of greater openness, greater ability and willingness rather,
to share information with the American public. Intelligence has traditionally
operated under a cloak of great secrecy, and there's a great need for
secrecy. But at the same time, I firmly believe that the American public
has the right to know as much about what we do as we can share with them.
Because the more we can share the more we can help enhance the quality of
the American debate on important international topics. The more we share.
with the American public, the more feedback we get; the more interchange
we have that helps us from getting into a little rut and accepting standard
views rather than exploring and looking for new ideas and new hypotheses.
And the more we share, the more we can make the American public appreciate
what we do for them; the more we can build up some sense of confidence that
we are, in fact, serving this country to the very best of our ability.
So, what we do today is when we do a classified study and when
we're all finished with it and we put the label on the top of it that says
top secret, or confidential, or destroy before reading, we ask can we take
out the information in there that first of all would give away how we got
the information. Because if we give away the way we obtained it, we won't
get it again. If everybody in the Axis Powers had known during World War II
that we were breaking their code, we'd have soon lost that capability. So
we must protect our sources, and ways of getting information. Secondly,
we take out of these studies any very unique information that gives our
policy makers a distinct advantage because they have it and nobody else
does. But if, when we've done these two things, there is still enough
left to be of real value to the American public, we publish it. Over two
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studies a week this past year were published. Topics like the world
energy situation, the outlook for the next ten years, the world steel
market, the prospects for terrorism in the international sphere, and so
on. We hope that these have indeed helped the American public debate.
Another reason for publishing more unclassified data however,
is to help protect that information which must be kept secret. There is
simply too much classified information in our government today and that
engenders a lack of respect for it. We see that in many ways today. We
see people going out and writing stories, publishing books that transgress
the bounds of accepted rules and secrecy. That, I would suggest to you,
is a very dangerous thing if it continues on and if it leads to what I
would describe as a situation of real chaos: when every one of us, 215
million Americans, feels that he knows best and has the right to decide
what this government can keep secret and what it should not keep secret.
I think the time has come to set aside the Watergate mentality which says
that automatically any of us who are your public servants are suspect and
are really out to only feather our own interests, rather than to do what
is good for the country.
I'm not suggesting that you take us just on our word or our
appearance, but I'm suggesting that the second thing we have done in-recent
years to give the American public even greater assurance of how we are
conducting intelligence activities, is to accent what I call the oversight
process. Now because we must maintain a great deal of secrecy, we cannot
have what would be called public oversight, but we can have surrogate
public oversight. I got in trouble the other night, I made mention of
this in a group of people from St. Louis and they said that down there,
with Masters and Johnson, that surrogate has a different meaning that I
was using. Seriously, we have today out of this crucible of public criticism
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of the last three years, forged a surrogate process for conducting over-
sight of the intelligence activities of our country. The first surrogate
is the President of the United States and the Vice President. They take
a very keen interest and give me a lot of their time to insure that they
do know what is going on in the intelligence world. The second surrogate
is a body that was created just two years ago called the Intelligence
Oversight Board: three distinguished Americans who report only to the
President of the United States and whose only task is to check on the
legality and the propriety of what I and the other members of your intelli-
gence community are doing. Anyone in the community, anyone in the public,
may communicate with these people and make suggestions to them as to what
should be looked into. Thirdly, we have within the last year and a half,
established two committees of the Congress, one in each chamber, to over-
see the overall intelligence process of the country. These oversight
committees are very, very useful and they are doing I think a rigorous,
thorough, but fair job, in checking on us and having us report to them as
to what we're doing, and it's of good value to us. It frankly helps us
share the 'load with the difficult decisions we sometimes must make. But
beyond that, it helps to keep us in touch with the public and the attitude
of this country.
There are, of course, risks in all this oversight. First, there
is the risk that it will lead to leaks of information. The more people
who know a secret, the more likely it is to leak. Secondly, there are
risks of intelligence by timidity. If we have to tell too many people, we
may not take risks which we must take from time to time. I would say to
you in all sincerity that we are today seeking to find the right balance
between the. amount of oversight and the degree of risks of either leaks
or timidity that we should be accepting in this country in our intelligence
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activities. I think it will take another year or two before I can come
back here and assure you that that proper balance has been found. It's a
gradual process that takes a combination and understanding between us and
the public;, between us and the Congress, between us and the President,
and so on down the line. I believe we are moving in the right direction.
I believe sincerely that, on the one hand, we are strengthening the process
of collecting and evaluating intelligence information and that we are today
the number one intelligence service in the world. I also believe, on the
other hand, that we are doing this while finding the right balance to
protect the rights and values of the American citizens in the process.
I assure you that I am dedicated both to keeping our intelligence number
one in the world, and at the same time doing so in a way that will only
strengthen our democratic institution.
Thank you very much.
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Q&A - LIONS CLUB - LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY
Q: What could be done to prevent ex-CIA agents and others from writing
books and divulging information?
A: That's a very good question. You may note that our Attorney General,
Griffith Bell, has recently taken what I think was a difficult but courageous
decision. He is prosecuting a gentleman named Snepp who recently did publish
a book, published a book in defiance of the fact that he had both signed a
written agreement with us that he would submit his book, or writings, to
us for security clearance only--an agreement all of our employees at the
Central Intelligence Agency make. He also violated an oral promise made
to me personally that he would do so. The Attorney General is prosecuting
him on the grounds that he broke this contract and we hope this will be an
example to others that they cannot ignore an agreement such as this. Beyond
that, sir, I would only say I think, as a country, we need to recognize
that the so-called whistle-blowers who came out of this Watergate mentality
are not necessarily heroes; that they should, instead of just going out and
writing a book and publishing it, they should use these established over-
sight procedures at least first to see if they can't get the recourse that
they want through those procedures. I have yet to find a so-called whistle-
blower who did that. He went out on his own, I think more for self-serving
purposes generally, rather than to really help the country by publishing.
Q: I heard recently where the Russians again have missiles in Cuba and
now that we have gathered this information, what are we going to do with
it? I haven't heard anything else about it.
A: I. don't have any information about new Russian missiles in Cuba,
certainly not missiles that....
Q: I read an article in one of the weekly magazines that there was infor-
mation gathered that they now have their missiles and sites again in Cuba
and so forth, and you're saying this is not according to what we....
A: I'm saying that I don't have that information and it does prove that
occasionally I make mistakes but I think almost more often that you'll find
that you can't always believe what you read in the press. I think we'd be
alerting a lot of people if we thought we were back in the same situation
we've been in before.
Q: Do you feel that the Carter Administration is weakening this country
militarily--our military forces?
A: Do I think the Carter Administration is weakening this country militarily?
Are you asking me whether I should try to resign tomorrow, or.... No,
seriously, I do want to make a serious point here. I'm unfortunately not
going to answer your question directly, not because I don't want to be
forthright with you. I do want to emphasize to you that when I took off my
Admiral's hat in terms of leaving my Navy job and I came to the Central
Intelligence job, I had to recognize that I was leaving a role as being a
policy maker--someone who tried to have an opinion and influence what the
shape of our military was--to someone who should not play a policy making
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role. Because if ever our intelligence people take sides--with a policy
axe to grind--on the intelligence that comes in and must be evaluated and
provided to our policy makers.... So, I really am encumbered from commenting
on your question.
Q: Admiral Turner, are you having difficulty at the present time in
securing agents or keeping agents that you have now because of things that
have happened to agents in the last several years?
A: No, we are not. Our recruiting is very good. Interestingly, it has
generally maintained its quality during this period of criticism. The young
people, particularly on our college campuses, have generally seen through
the smoke screen and have come to us in as good numbers as before and the
quality still remains very high. We take about one out of ten serious
applicants. I'm not talking about people who telephone in, I'm talking
about people we really process. The competition is very keen; and you may
be in part referring to the fact that I had the unpleasant task last fall
of commencing a reduction of 820 people in the Central Intelligence Agency;
one I happen to think was long overdue, very necessary, in order to provide
an opportunity for these younger people who are coming in to progress along
and see that there is a career ahead of them. There was too much stagnation
of fine people, all came in at the beginning you see, and now it's about 30
years afterwards and they're all up there towards the top, and because I
want very much to ensure that my successor's successor out in the 1980s and
1990s will have the same high quality of people we have today. I want to
provide that opportunity to the young people coming along and therefore I
have felt it necessary to weed out some of the people at the top.
Q: Sir, you indicate that the CIA is number one in intelligence in the
world. What kind of an adversary is the KGB?
A: The KGB is a very strong, clever, unscrupulous adversary. They put a
great deal of money and effort into their intelligence work. I think I
would have to say they are probably better than we in this human intelli-
gence business. They devote thousands and thousands of people to it every
year and they have increased the number of people they can send to this
country because of all the kinds of new opportunities there are for inter-
change today. I believe we are well ahead of them in these technical
means of collecting intelligence that I mentioned to you--ahead because of
the basic drive, ingenuity, sophistication and intelligence of American
industry that creates these technical opportunities for us. Finally, I
would want to say that I think we will always remain ahead of them in one
area, and that's evaluating intelligence data that vie collect. Because
the essence of that is to be sure that you look at it objectively, to be
sure that you let alternative competitive views of interpretation come
forward because no one of us is omniscient, and no set of intelligence
data is so clear that you know exactly what it means. You must do a lot
of interpretation. I assure you I believe that can be done much better
in a free society where you encourage dissenting views, than in a totalitarian
society where you lose your neck if you dissent.
Q: Admiral Turner, you mentioned a three-person oversight committee. How
are these people selected and for what term, if it is a term of office?
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A: They are selected strictly by the President as people in whom he has
confidence. He picked a neighbor of yours, ex-Senator Gore. He picked
ex-Governor Scranton. A democrat and a republican, people of great stature
in our country. People I think we all have learned to respect over the
years. He picked a man named Thomas Farmer, who is a lawyer in Washington,
D.C., a very distinguished gentleman, the chairman of this board. There
is no length of tenure on it; it's strictly a matter of do they please
the President, do they do the job rigorously and the way he wants, and
they meet with him regularly to keep him posted. I failed to mention in
the course of discussing oversight that one of the people on the Senate
Intelligence Oversight Committee, whom I particularly enjoy working with,
is your own Senator Dee Huddleston. He just does a marvelous job for us.
Q: Sir, on the same plane of thought we had a while ago, is the CIA and
FBI working effectively together or is there still a lot of animosity
between the two agencies?
A: We're working very effectively together. There's been a tremendous
improvement from the last days of Mr. Hoover's term when there was,
admittedly very poor coordination between them. That has really turned
around. I watched it carefully over this past year and am satisfied
that it's in good shape. ....[at this point the cassette was turned over
and a portion of the answer was lost.] I'm sure that the two of us are
going to do everything we can to bring that relationship into an even
more cooperative, warmer atmosphere in the years ahead.
Q: Inaudible.
A: Yes, we have a training program that lasts a different amount of time
depending on whether you are going to end up working in the Headquarters
being an analyst or a support person; or whether you are going to go out
in the field and conduct our clandestine operations. We take everybody
and put them through a basic course of understanding intelligence--having
to understand almost a course in law to understand what we can do and what
we can't do--understanding the organization, how we establish the require-
ments for what we want to collect, how we process that information and turn
out finished estimates. If you are going to go out in the field and work,
there is a great deal of tradecraft we call it, skills of the trade,
operating agents in the field. The kind of skills that you have to have
in almost every profession, any basic industry. We put people through
an extra course of those and we might even, for instance, send three
people out here to Lexington and make them walk around the streets and see
if they could shake their tail, i r= you see what I mean. You put them out
on a common street in some city and ask them to see if they can get rid
of a deliberate surveillance that we have put on them--that kind of real
tradecraft training. It's a rigorous course, it takes a lot of stamina.
I know you would be as proud as I when I go down and see them in their
training and hand out the certificates at their graduation; to see the high
quality of young men and young women who go into this difficult business.
Young men and young women who will then, after they graduate, go overseas,
have to remain anonymous, have to tell their families they're working
somewhere else, not take credit for this, look forward to many many years
of this deprivation; working under very difficult con-ditions in sometimes
very different cultures and societies, and to see them with the quality and
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dedication that they have when they come to us. It's very heartwarming to
know that we have that kind of reaction, that kind of person in our country
today.
Q: What kind of motivation do these people have?
A: I think they really have a motivation of patriotism. Plus I would say
to you that once you've been in the Central Intelligence Agency for a
little while, you're just inspired by the enthusiasm, the importance of
what's going on, and the high quality of the overall organization and people.
I say that unabashedly because I've been there such a short time really
that I'm not taking any credit for that. I'm saying that I've watched
others come in and just get caught up in the professionalism, the enthusiasm
of the organization. It's really a very highly dedicated group of people
who know what they're doing and they inspire others who join to stick with
it and to give it that same dedication.
Q: Would it be inappropriate to ask you something about the scope of
operations? I am wondering would have maybe three, six, or a. dozen agents
in each South American country, or could you give us some idea with regard
to scope without telling something you shouldn't tell?
A: I can say to you that our representation abroad obviously varies with
the importance of the area; it varies with what we think will be the
opportunity there, and you can appreciate that you have to gauge each
individual country, each individual city that you want to be represented in,
as to what its potential is for providing intelligence information back to
you. We're constantly changing those allocations as the nation's interest
changes, as the activities of the Soviet Union and the satellite countries
change, as the activities of many of the other countries themselves change.
So, it's difficult to give you a quantitative answer in a constantly changing
target.