DCI TALK TO SAN DIEGO CHAMBER OF COMMERCE & KIWANIS CLUB

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00498R000200090003-1
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 14
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 28, 2007
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: August 8, 1978
• Content Type: REPORT

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DCI TALK TO SAN DIEGO
CHAMBER OF COMMERCE & KIWANIS CLUB
TUESDAY, 8 August 1978
Thank you very much Dick, despite your gross exaggerations. Bob, thank you
for having me here. Kiwanis side. It is really a great treat for Pat and
me to be back in San Diego. I did four tours of sea duty base here and
found it such a wonderful place to live. Pat and I feel though, if we
left our daughter, son-in-law, a mother, an uncle and aunts, cousins,
godsons, all here in San Diego so we are very much at home with you whenever
we have this kind of opportunity to come back. Because of that background
I know how much San Diegans are concerned and interested in matters of
national security, so I am delighted to have the chance to talk to you
about American intelligence, because our intelligence capability is indeed
one of the cornerstones of our national security. It is interesting I think
to look back and realize that perhaps as little as five or 8 years ago
this talk probably would not have taken place. In those days intelligence
simply was not discussed in public. It was almost totally secretive.
And yet, since then the events in Vietnam and Watergate have virtually
propelled intelligence activities into the headlines. Allegations have
followed upon allegations. Stories have been written over and over again
in the press. And what hasn't been written in the press has been disclosed
by former agents in their books. What has happened is that American intelligence
has come to operate in a much more open way than ever before in its history.
Well, you might ask, can you, in this kind of a fishbowl continue to be
effective. Can you cast away this tradition and past precedent of total
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secrecy and still do the job that needs to be done for our country?
What I would like to say to you today is, in my opinion, is yes.
Not inspite of this new openness but because of it. Being open is being
more
American and therefore I believe we find great strengths in being/open
with you, the American public. First, because I sincerely believe that no
agency of our government can remain effective over the long run unless it
has the support of the American public. Now, intelligence over the years
has always had that support, but it has had it largely on faith. Largely
on an inherent recognition by the American public that there were some things
about which you could not and should not talk. The result, however, was that
in 1975 and 1976, when we were cast into the press and under intensive
public 'criticism there simply was no reservoir of understanding, of support.
There was no way for the American public to balance past achievements
of the intelligence community with these alleged abuses. So, by being more
open today we hope and expect that we are generating a sense of support,
a sense of understanding and we are doing that in a number of ways.
My being here with you today is part of that commitment to openness.
I and my deputy, Ambassador Frank Carlucci speak on the average perhaps to
about six groups across our country every month. Secondly, we are being
more open with the American media when they make inquiries to us.
There are still many, many instances when all we can say is--no comment.
But our needle is not stuck in that groove anymore. Thirdly, we are
publishing more in unclassified form and made available to the public
and we think that is making a contribution. But, let me note to you at
this point that these are controlled disseminations, all three of these
steps--speeches, media responses and publications. They are done by
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responsible authority. We are not simply opening the floodgates and telling
every intelligence professional that he can go out and say what he wants to say.
Clearly we must not talk about those things which cannot be discussed in public
without danger to our country. For instance, I mentioned our publications.
What we do today is when any element of the intelligence community produces
a classified study, we take a look at it and we say to ourselves if we remove
from that study those elements which really must remain secret, will there
be enough left to be of value to the American public? Would what was left
enhance the quality of American debate on some important topic? If the answer
is yes, we publish it.. We publish on a wide diversity of topics. Energy
forecasts, international terrorism, international economic statistics,
Soviet military expenditures, Soviet military strengths and recently an
interesting one on the civil defense program in the Soviet Union.
I brought some of these with me and they will be available to those who are
interested at the door when we leave. Now I can assure you that with this
policy of openness the problem of protecting our true secrets in this country
is still a very substantial one. Yet, I believe that greater openness is
one way to insure greater secrecy. If that appears to you to be a contradiction,
let me explain it to you briefly.
By publishing more and putting it into the public domain we are
in fact constricting the amount of classified information that must be kept
by the Government. One of the greatest problems we have today in retaining
secrets is that so much that is not really secret is so labeled. People look
at that document, it says Confidential, or secret, or top secret or maybe
destroy before reading and they don't really believe it. And we do have
a very serious problem of too many leaks of things which must and should be
kept secret.
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Every reporter, today, it seems to me aspires to be a Woodward or
a Bernstein. Recently, for instance, one of the presidents of a major
university made the comment that just a few years ago college graduates
aspired to go into medicine. Today, they think they can find their fame
and fortune better in journalism. The rewards, the satisfaction of criticizing
our society, from uncovering its faults and its worts appear to be greater
today than from helping to build our society. Too often, today every public
servant is suspect, every renegade so-called whistle blower is an automatic
hero.
Let me again say to you, when there is little trust of public officials
and when destroying is preferred by many to building, we as a nation our in
trouble. Let me assure you, nonetheless, that I view the activities, the
revelations of Woodward and Bernstein as an important contribution to the
strength of our country. But we mist never forget that when they were finished,
somebody had to step in and begin the job of building back again. Yes, there
has been too much secrecy in the past and there is too much secrecy today in
government, but secrecy is not inherently good or bad, moral or immoral.
Secrecy is simply a condition of necessity. There are certain things which
governments, business and private individuals will not do unless there is
some modicum of assurance of confidentiality. It is particularly true of course
with governments, it is particularly true with the intelligence activities of
governments. Our country today has a legitimate need to know what is going on
in foreign lands, because more today than perhaps ever before in our history
what happens abroad can have a direct bearing on you and on me and our country's
welfare. Yet, many of these countries that have this impact on us are not
open societys like ours. Not ones where you can get a feel for what is going
on by reading the newspapers--you need intelligence. And yet, if we were to
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disclose our sources of gaining that information for our nation's policymakers,
clearly those sources would dry up. Remember how in World War II we broke
the German and Japanese codes. Think how little good that would have done us
if we had permitted that to leak out into the public. The problem, however,
is how with some need for secrecy such as this can we give assurance to the
American public that the secrets are not being held for purposes of covering up
misdeeds or malfeasance. Well, I believe that out of the crucible of these
last several years of criticism of the American intelligence community, we
have been forging a new process of what I call surrogate public oversight.
By that I mean that when the public cannot know everything we can establish
surrogates for the public, who will know as much as is necessary for the right
check upon our activities. Who are those surrogates? First, there is the
President and Vice President of the United States. Today they take a very
keen and active interest in our intelligence activities. I meet personally
with the President weekly and keep him fully posted of the things that
we are doing. He and the Vice President don't hesitate to give me guidance
and specific direction.
Secondly, 2 1/2 years ago we created something known as the Intelligence
Oversight Board. That board today consists of three distinguished Americans,
former Senatore Gore of Tennessee; former governor Scranton of Pennsylvania;
and a Washington attorney Thomas Farmer. These three gentlemen are empowered
to look into the legality and propriety of what we are doing in the world
of intelligence. If--any member of the intelligence community or for that matter
any private citizen wants to look into or believes he knows there is something
being done improperly or illegally by any of us in the world of intelligence,
he can communicate with this board. The board will investigate and then will
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report only to the President of the United States what they believe should
be done about it. I believe that these procedures today, for surrogate oversight
give the American public a greater. assurance than has every been possible before
that we are conducting our intelligence activities in conformance with the
standards the American public would want us to, and also in conformance with
the overall foreign policy of our country. And at the same time I would
suggest that these surrogate oversight mechanisms provide to the so-called
whistle-blowers a wonderful opportunity if they are really interested in reform
rather than in simply praise or profit. Because if the whistle blower will
go to one of these oversight mechanisms first he can avoid disclosing classified
information that could be of grave harm to our country and only afterwards
if he failed in that process feel that he actually had to go public.
Now let me be totally candid with you. Clearly, there are risks in oversight.
First, there is the risk of leaks. The more people who know any given secret,
no matter who they are, the more probability that there will be a leak.
And beyond that there is the risk of overmanagement. As people oversee
they sometimes tend to want to get into increasing amount of detail and in fact
to direct or manage rather than oversee. And in intelligence as in anything else
too many cooks can spoil the broth. I think that what we need is to establish
a right balance between enough oversight to give assurance, but not so much as
to follow our intelligence activities. Today we are developing that balance
and I think that proportions are correct. But, again I would be candid with you
it will probably be another two years before we have adjusted and worked out the
system of checks and balances and our certain that we are really on solid footing.
Well, you might ask me--is it all worth it? Is it worth the risk
to have this oversight? I think so. for two principal reasons. It does give
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an assurance not only to the American public, but to us within the intelligence
community that we are on the right track. Secondly, let me point out that it is
much easier to manage a large organization when it is held very strictly accountable.
Particularly in a sensitive and secretive business like intelligence, it is easy
to get carried away with dedicated enthusiasm. It is easy perhaps to take risks
that perhaps aren't warranted, but when you know that you are going to have to
stand up and defend those decisions in front of skeptics, infront of people who
are overseeing you, you feel now that you have a different measure of what
actions you can and you should take. It helps, it really does help a manager to
have an organization that is held accountable. So what I am saying to you
is that in my view the risks of oversight and openness are more than counterbalanced
by the benefits. The benefits of greater support from the American people,
the benefits of greater security for our secret information through narrowing the
corpus of secrets, the benefits of greater assurance against abuses and the
benefits of easier management procedures. Now there are several other exciting
developments in American intelligence today that I would like to mention briefly.
One of these is the changes in the way we go about collecting intelligence
information. Basically, there are two ways to get intelligence data. One is the
traditional human agent, the spy. The other is the more modern technique
of using sophisticated technical procedures to gain information, usually by means
of photographs or by means of intercepting signals that are going through the air.
There has been almost a revolution in this technical side of intelligence
collection in the last several decades. Because we are the most sophisticated
technological nation in the world, this gives us one of our great advantages
in the field of intelligence today. We in fact are able with these technical
means to collect a wealth of data, almost so much that we-may be surfeited.
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And yet, what a photograph will tell you, for instance, is generally what
happened yesterday. And what you often want to know is why did it happen yesterday
and what is going to happen tomorrow. That is the forte of the traditional
human intelligence agent. Seeking out people's intentions, people's plans,
people's ideas for the future. So what we are trying to do today is find
the right mix between the old human agent and the new sophisticated technical
techniques. :[t is an interesting and exciting challenge, particularly when
you have a large and diverse bureaucracy that you must bring about a sense of
true team work in.
Secondly, there is also a remarked change in the focus of our intelligence
efforts overall. If you look back 30 years to when this country first
organized'a central intelligence activity, our principal focus in those days
was the Soviet military effort. That was viewed as the primary threat to
our country and therefore all of our intelligence organizations focused
primarily on that. Look at how the world has changed since then. Today
our country has important, legitimate interests in most of the 150 some
nations in the world. And yet, our intercourse with most of those nations
is much more economic and political than it is military. And so, we have had
to expand our focus being-able to not only cover matters of military import,
but economic and political as well. Look.what that does to the number of
skills we must have, in our storehouse. Today we must be able to deal with
grain forecast, energy forecasts, medical predictions on leaders of the rest
of the world, political movements, economic data and so on. Its an expanding
challenge and one that really does stimulate us. Let me not overstate the case
because keeping our finger on the Soviet military threat still remains our
number one priority and it must. What I am saying is we have had to enhance
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our overall interests and our overall capabilities beyond just that.
Thus, what I am really saying to you is that today, our intelligence community
has got to learn to operate in a new environment a much more open environment
and at the same time it must also expand the types of information which it is
collecting and evaluating for the benefit of our national decision makers.
In short, this is an exciting, an important, even an historic moment in
American intelligence. But I believe we are doing is evolving a new model
a distinctly, uniquely, American model of intelligence. A model that truely
reflects American values and which in the same time permits us to be effective
in accomplishing intelligence tasks set before us. I believe we are the best
intelligence service in the world today. I assure you I am doing everything
I can to keep us on top. Thank you.
I would be happy to try to respond to any questions
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Q. In the past the intelligence community has been somewhat fragmented.
Different organizations going different directions. There have been
reports it is being more concentrated under your control, what is the status?
A. (repeats the question) Last January the president signed a new executive
order which did strengthen my role as the Director of Central Intelligence, the
coordinator of all of our nations intelligence activities, as opposed to my other
job as head of the CIA. He strengthened my authority over the budgets of the
intelligence community and over what we call taksing. Telling people what to
collect with these various technical and human means. But he was very careful
to ensure that there was no strengthening in my authority over what we call the
analytic or interpretive part, because no intelligence data is ever so conclusive
that you know exactly what it tells you. You want different interpretations,
you want different views to come forward and there are still independent and
analytic interpretative agencies inside the Defense department, the State department,
the Department of Energy, the Treasury and the CIA. So, we have tried to find
a balance of more centralized control to be sure that one man is responsible
for these risky, expensive collection efforts and yet diversity of interpretation
and analysis.. In the six months we have been working under this new order,
it is going splendidly from my point of view and I believe from everyone's.
Q.
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I read from several sources, that Soviet Russia has anywhere from 5 to 700 KGB
agents roaming our United States is that a true fact or not.
A. There are a lot of Soviet KGB agents in the United States I can't confirm that
number of 500-700 that you have suggested, but they are very considerable.
The Soviet Union is very strong, very active in this human intelligence field
that I have described to you and their agents are scattered throughout all of
their official activities, their embassy, their United Nations delegation and so on,
trade delegation and what not in the United States is very substantial. I think
we are their match in the human intelligence field because we are smart, not
because we have such a huge effort as they do. I think we are better than they
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as I mentioned in the sophisticated technical techniques. Finally, I would say
that you can do this interpretive function far better in a free society like
ours than you can in an autocratic society like theirs. If my analysts come
up with the conclusion that the President is doing something wrong, I can afford
to send that to him, I'm not sure than Mr. Andrepov in the KGB would stick his
neck out that far.
Q. Inaudible..
A. repeats the question - The question is with all these various intelligence
agencies in different parts of the government are we going to ensure that they
are going to pool their information, they will-share it so everybody can benefit
by it. The answer is yes. I tried to simplify my previous answer. Another
authority that the President gave me in January was to ensure exactly what you
are talking about. It is written in the Executive Order that I have authority
to ensure the dissemination of information. That'is not as simply as it seems
because if it is very secretive, and just by knowing this information you know
how we got it and therefore you can compromise our source, you have to be
discreet about how widely you distribute it, but we are working very diligently
to ensure that the dissemination authority I have been given is exercised so that
gets to the right people, but not too many people so we have leaks.
Q.This is one of the most skillful and statesman like presentations I have
heard in a long time. Does that mean you are going to run for President?
A. Well, I am sure that you can appreciate from the introductory remarks
that the fact I was a classmate of the President of the United States had
success in
nothing to do with my/getting this job, I have done it strictly on merit.
In all seriousness let me say to you. The question was do I want to run
for President of the United States. Let me assure you that I have watched
our fine President and I can tell you that that is the most backbreaking,
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the most demanding job that any man can ask for in our country, and I don't
know why people ask for it, but it really is amazing to see a man like
President Carter who has to cover such a span of knowledge, a span of activities
in his every day decisions and conversations, it really is a remarkable
ability that anyone who fills that job has to rise to.
Q. (Inaudible)
A. The Soviet civil defense effort? Is quite extensive. We believe today
that they can put into shelters the majority of their leadership and 10 to 20%
of the urban population. In order, however, to protect a more substantial
portion of their population they would have to go to evacuation of their major
cities, this would take a number of days to accomplish, when they had done that
they could reduce the population fatalities considerably. The implications for
us are certainly, number one, that they are interested in ensuring they do
build every part of a total warmaking capability and secondly, that before they
could use civil defense to really assist them in a potential war situation
they would have to give us a clear signal by commencing this evacuation on a
very mass scale.
Q. (Inaudible)
A. How accurate is Jade's fighting ships? They do a very credible job.
Q. Soviet Union and Communist China.
A. What is the status of the relationship between Soviet Union and Communist China?
Every indidation we have is that the rift between them is very strong, very deep
on both idealogical and practical grounds. Each seems to be genuinely concerned
of a military threat from the other. I see no signs at this time of any steps
toward reconciliation.
Q. Admiral Turner to follow up to the gentleman's question on Soviet defense.
Why is it the Soviet Union has a four-star general in charge of civil defense
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and their budget exceeds ours by almost 5 to one, and we have as our director
of civil defense the former campaign manager of President Carter.
A. Repeats the question. I alluded to that a minute ago, now let me expand.
The Soviet philosophy on military force is basically different than ours.
The Soviets feel the way to deter war is to have a total war fighting capability.
To be able tosit down and say to yourself, if a war came could I go through
every step that might take place if we had a nuclear war. I'm not advocating
one or the other, I think I am just saying that those are the two different
approaches to it lead to this difference in rank, and money and emphasis.
Q. Would you discuss the current oversight by the Congressional committees
ahd..the relationship CIA has with Congress now?
A. I am certainly glad you' asked that question now, because I totally overlooked
and omitted it, though it was supposed to be in my text. There are three basic
oversight bodies that I wanted to mention to you. The leadership of the Executive
Branch, the President and Vice President; the Intelligence Oversight Board is
subordinate to the Executive branch it is part of it; and then on the Congressional
side, two committees. One has been in business two years, one just a year now.
One in the House of Representatives one in the Senate. I am finding the oversight
committees, very fine and very helpful. On the one hand they give me advice
and I find that very useful. On the other hand, however, they are scrupulous
in ensuring that any time they suspect something may be done improperly, they
call me up interrogate me, my people,ask for reports and really do investigate
very thoroughly. I find them constructive in their tone, but nonethless, very
vigorous in their oversight procedures. It is with respect to them, however, that
I was alluding to the-fact that it would probably several years before
we settle out on just what this relationship is going to be. How much of our
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sources and methods of intelligence must I disclose to them in order to
give them the ability to do the oversight job that they are supposed to do.
It is a narrow line, it is a difficult one, it has been working well.
I am optimistic that it is going to come out well, but I told you it would
be some time before I can gurantee that to you. Their next step, which has
been under public debate with hearings in the Senate for the last four months,
is to write what they call charters for the intelligence community. To rewrite
the basic law concenring intelligence and~ery specifically to lay out
what the rules are under which I am to operate in the future. The nature of
that law is going to be very important to us, we are working with them, I am
sure it is going to come out well, it is going to take time to do it.
I really am grateful for your intense interest and your excellent questions.
It has been fun to be with you and it is always great to be back in this
wonderful city.
Admiral Turner, I think I should point out the reason for the question about
KGB activities in the United States is because we have a very famous KGB agent
in San Diego, but you needn't worry because he is a chicken, and I'm just actually
amazed that he is not here today. But on a serious note, we thank you very much.
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