ADDRESS BY ADM. STANSFIELD TURNER, DCI, TO THE DCI MANAGEMENT ADVISORY GROUP

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00498R000200120001-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 7
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 28, 2007
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: October 24, 1979
• Content Type: REPORT

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Address by Admiral Stansfield Turn r?
LY
Director of Central Intelligence The DCI Management Advisory Group
In-House Speakers Program
CIA Auditorium.
Wednesday, 24 October 1979
I would like to start by thanking the DCI MAG for inaugurating
this program. This is the third in a series. If there is one
thing that will help us all in the Agency it is improved internal
communications. As large as we are, as spread out as we are around the
world let alone in Washington, and as necessary as it is to have some
kind of compartmentation, internal communications are really difficult.
Anything like this that will help I think is just great.
I really don't want to talk very long. I want to take your
questions, your comments, your suggestions. But I thought perhaps
you would like me to say a few words on two topics: how I view the
internal situation of the Agency today, and what the status of our
external relationships are; specifically, how do our customers perceive
us and are they using our product? Let me start here at home.
Inside the Agency, I have never been more optimistic, never
felt better about the internal state of affairs. I think in the
last year we have clearly turned the corner on those years of concern
about the investigations and the ensuing adverse publicity we received.
I think, as an Agency, and as individuals, we now have put the past
into perspective. Some of the criticism was justifiable. Much of it
was media exaggeration. I think we all recognize now that while mistakes
may have been made, they must be kept in proportion. Today we have
the right controls, the right attitudes to ensure that we go forward in
the proper manner. I sense throughout the organization today that the
spirit, the attitude, the hope, our expectations for the future are
where they should be.
One thing that has particularly pleased me over the last year and
a half has been the increasing sense of teamwork and cooperation
between the four directorates and between the independent offices and
the directorates. This teamwork is critical to our success. Most of
all, because of the quality of our people, I feel very confident
of what we are doing now and of our capability to do our job for the
future. We have been blessed for 32 years with top quality people.
Today that continues to be one of our great strengths. If there is one
the Director
responsibility that each of us shares, not just the DDCI,
of Personnel, and myself, but also each of you is to ensure that we
continue to recruit and keep the same quality of people so that we have
as good a CIA in 1989 and 1999 as we do in 1979. That is absolutely
fundamental. Consequently, I have felt that personnel matters and
personnel management have been my greatest personal responsibility.
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LCst winter, es you know, w_ received se. t i.u:,erb assistance from
tre ',_ticnal Academy of Professional Administrators, a group with
an i::.pressive background in personnel administration from all elements
of industry and the government. We are all pleased that the end result
of their 3 month study was to reaffirm that we have a basically sound
personnel management organization. At the same time they suggested
many ways in which we can better use our management system to the
individual employee's advantage more. Since that report came in last
winter, we have been working on their suggestions. We have instituted
a more uniform promotion system, based more on the panels. In fact, we
are going to panels in all promotion areas. Clerical panels, for
example, have been instituted for the first time. There is still more
to be done, but we feel that the uniform, panel-based promotion system
will ensure more equitable, utterly fair opportunity for the individual
employee to be recognized and rewarded for the contribution which he
or she is making. The new performance evaluation report is intended,
to be sure that employees put their best foot forward to the panels.
Inter- and intra-directorate rotation opportunity is being increased.
This will broaden employees experience and increase their perspective.
It will also improve their chances of finding exactly the right career
niche.
More stress is being placed on recruiting the right quality and
quantity of people. Recruiting is up in both numbers and quality. We
are now working hard to reduce the time it takes from the receipt of an
application from a potential recruit to the time we say yes or no. We
have sometimes lost good candidates because of the delays that we have
particularly with our security procedures.
We are putting more stress on helping low performers. We are
counseling them, moving them to areas which are better suited to their
talents, helping them to grow so that they can increase their productivity
and enjoy a rewarding career.
As we go through the rest of the NAPA recommendations, rejecting
some and accepting others, two basic personnel objectives are always in
mind: first, to be sure we have the right mix and quality of people to
do the Agency's job in the future, and secondly, to afford a reasonable
career opportunity to each individual employee; an opportunity to
contribute, to utilize his or her talents, an opportunity for reasonable
promotion potential as well as other rewards.
Each of those goals requires a good personnel management system,
which we have. But, we always need to keep sharpening the ability of.
that system to look at each employee as an individual and ask, what is
the next career step? What training? What rotation? What assignments
will best help this employee utilize his or her talents to the Agency's
and the employees advantage? Are we helping that employee to contribute
as much as he possibly-can?
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Secondly, the personnel management system must prevent employees
from being blocked in their promotion opportunity by humps and valleys.
As people come into the Agency, if we don't look far enough ahead and
make well-founded decisions on whether we need them at the bottom or
somewhere in the middle, we can easily end up as we have in some areas
of the Agency today with too many people in some grades and qualifications
and too few in others. An employee who comes right behind a grade or
qualification hump has very little opportunity to advance. One who
comes right behind a valley, may be advanced so rapidly that they don't
have the experience necessary to do the job they are asked to do. We
must be able to level out those humps and valleys; to give all employees
the same opportunity to advance. One of the ways is through good
planning, as I have just described. Another is to take advantage of the
fact that we are one agency, with a uniform promotion and personnel
management system. If we have the interdirectorate mobility which one
agency implies, we can shift people from a hump to a valley and thereby
equalize opportunity.
Let me digress here for a moment to say that my comments at the
beginning about greater cooperation and teamwork are part of my enthusiasm
for the fact that we are becoming more and more of one agency. That is
very important. The profession of intelligence has changed over the
last fifteen or twenty years. Being one agency in which each directorate
works intimately with the others is a fact of life, and is more critical
to us today than it has ever been. The DDO provides HUMINT. Why?
Because the NFAC needs it. Then NFAC and the DDO turn to the DDS&T and
ask what SIGINT and,PHOTINT are bringing in which will help us.
How do we bring all three of these disciplines together? Only teamwork
enables us to best use an agent; to build on what is known from SIGINT
and PHOTINT. It is wasteful and an unnecessary risk to use a spy, an
agent, when you can get a picture with a satellite. In turn, you
frequently target an agent to find out how best to target SIGINT and
PHOTINT. We have had some superlative examples in recent years of this
kind of teamwork. This teamwork, this thinking of ourselves as actually
being one agency where there is good communication between all of the
directorates, is utterly vital. I am very encouraged by the evolution
I see in that direction.
Let me shift to the external side. None of us would want to be
here if we didn't feel we were making a contribution to the decision
making and policy formulation of our government. That is why we are
here and without that our work would give us little satisfaction. So
let's look at our customers.
Clearly the President, the National Security Council Staff, and
the Cabinet members who deal with foreign policy, are our principal
customers. People ask me, how are we doing with the President? We are
doing very well with the President and his chief foreign policy advisors.
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Iher, !eorc always says, well wr,a_ the intelligence failure
in Iran? It was just a year ago now that we had the so-called intelli-
gence failure in Iran and the President wrote a note to the Secretary
of State, Dr. Brzezinski and myself suggesting that we could improve
political intelligence reporting. The President didn't say, nor is it
true, that that situation represented an intelligence failure. That
was coined by the American media and was an exaggeration. We would
have liked to have done better, but there was no failure. The President's
suggestions have helped us improve for the future. Among other things, a
fine political intelligence working group has evolved around the DDCI,
David Aaron of the NSC and David Newsom from State which today ensures
the same kind of communication and teamwork I've been talking about in
the Agency. As a result, we are getting a lot more support, particularly
on problems like cover.
Put the shoe on the other foot. If we had not done quite as well
as we would have liked in Iran, and the President had said nothing to
me, and incidentally this wasn't the first time he made a suggestion to
me, think of the implications of that. To me that would have implied
that he wasn't concerned, that he wasn't reading and depending on his
intelligence input. The fact that he was concerned and interested is
indicative of how important he regards what we do for him. Six mornings
a week we give him a Presidential Daily Brief--the PDB--and I guarantee
you it is the highest quality intelligence product in this or any town.
Regularly I brief him orally both on substantive matters and on what we
are doing and how we are doing it. He is intensely interested, and
wants to be kept abreast of intelligence activities.
In National Security Council meetings and meetings of subordinate
committees of the Council, very frequently it is the Intelligence
Community which leads off and sets the background of the situation
which is up for debate. I think--though I haven't been here long--from
what I have seen and heard, that our product is better utilized today,
more visible, more relied upon by the top Executive Branch policy-makers
than perhaps ever before in the Agency's history.
Now let me point out that there is a downside, a problem side to that.
The more you are responsive to the Administration's needs for intelligence,
the more likely it is that somebody will say you are so responsive
you are not being objective, detached from the policy process. You are
being politicized. There is nothing that is further from the truth
today than that. Let me give you an example.
Last week there was a story in the newspaper about an NSC sub-committee
meeting on Morocco. I was chagrined when I read that the Central Intelligence
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had t_t.en a position that arras should not L)e sucvt lied to Morocco_
assure you that while I did give that initial briefing, as you would
expect, I neither took a position for nor against arms for Morocco.
I merely set the background for discussions. From what we said about
the factual situation, somebody at that meeting drew his own conclusion
as to whether that meant we should give arms or should not give arms to
Morocco and then, in conjunction with leaking the whole meeting,
attributed his conclusion to us. It is a hazard we constantly run, but
we were not politicized.
If you want the best example of all, it is SALT II. If there was
ever a case where the intelligence agencies could have been put under
intense pressure to make the intelligence fit the policy, it certainly
is SALT II, the prime foreign policy objective of this Administration.
From the beginning, we have held resolutely to one position: we talk
about monitoring SALT, we do not talk about verifying SALT. We
don't make judgments on whether SALT monitoring is adequate for
verification, adequate for the safety, adequate for the security of our
country. Those' are political judgments. That permits us to give
Congress and the Administration the information that they need to make
those judgments, but it does not put us in the position of supporting
or not supporting the treaty because it is verifiable or not verifiable.
I don't think that you can find anyone in the Administration, on
Capitol Hill, or, in this case, even in the media who would seriously
contend that the Central Intelligence Agency was politicized thus far
over SALT II. I intend for us to stay that way.
If we are ever accused of being politicized, pull some of these
examples out of your hip pocket. Would a politicized Agency have
disclosed in the middle of the SALT II debates that the Soviets had a
brigade in Cuba? Would a politicized Agency have undercut an Administration
policy on Korea by revealing a build-up of North Korean military
forces? Would a politicized Agency in the middile of a debate on the
Panama Canal Treaty have disclosed that some of Trujillos relatives
were dealing in drugs? Would a politicized Agency have published some
of the unclassified studies that we have published in the last couple
of years, some of which have not been very popular with the policy
makers? Of course not. I don't believe we have been politicized, and
I think the record proves it. I believe we are supporting the
President well and he in turn is supporting us well. Look at his
October 1st speech on the Cuban brigade. He specifically mentioned the
need to enhance intelligence community capabilities. He specifically
mentioned the great importance of measures to protect our sources and
methods. And, while it was not in his speech, in the private briefings
he gave to members of Congress and others he laid great personal stress
on the fact that he saw no evidence of an intelligence failure or
shortcoming in connection with the Soviet brigade. I feel that uncovering
the brigade in Cuba for what it is was quite a coup on our part. One
that involved that dovetailing of intelligence and teamwork that I
mentioned to you earlier.
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We've turned the corner with the public in part also because we
have been more open with them and have tried to help them understand
what intelligence contributes to our national security. I know that
this is controversial, but let me say with deep conviction that there
is no way we can avoid being more open with the American public. The
secrecy of the past is gone. The persevering, inquiring reporters are
there on the doorstep every day. If they don't get it straight from us,
they are going to get it crooked from somebody else. More importantly,
there is a basic premise in a democracy that the more the public knows
about the functioning of government, the better that government will
be. I believe that. I believe that we in the government think we know
what is best for the country; that we know best how to handle complex
foreign policy and domestic policy situations. But that is not so.
The American public knows best. It takes them time, but when they
understand what is going on, and when they set their course, they will
do a better job than any of us in the government in determining which
way the country should be going on major issues. If there is any truth
to that premise, then I don't believe we should pretend that everything
we own is classified or must be classified and therefore kept from
the public. That would be false anyway. It would be dangerous for us to
try to withdraw into a total cloak of anonymity because, where there
have been mistakes in the past, it has not been because of deliberate,
maliciousness. More often than not, it resulted from an understandable
over enthusiasm which, because of the nature of our business, could be
shrouded in a secret environment where adequate checks and balances
could not function.
Our willingness today to share more of what we are about with
the American public has brought significant and positive results.
We are helping the public to carry on sensible, useful debates on
critical topics like the energy issue. We are helping the public to
understand the intelligence function and the contribution it makes to
good government. In so doing we are banking good will and understanding
that we could well have used in 1975-76. But let me reemphasize that
what we are talking about is controlled openness; carefully controlled
openness. No openness for classified material. No openness for
sources and methods. No openness for how we go about our business. But
openness by recognizing that if it can be unclassified, there is no
reason not to make it available to the public. In so doing we help
ourselves to protect what is classified.
Better security goes hand in hand with greater openness. Everyone
of us in this room would acknowledge, I believe, that there is too much
classified material in all of our safes. As we winnow that down by
weeding out what really doesn't have to be classified, we will reduce
what we must protect and hopefully we will at the same time grow to
respect better what is left.
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Improving security is, as you know, one of our major policy
initiatives. We are working hard on Capitol Hill and in the Executive
Branch for Freedom of Information relief legislation,
for identities l legislation of the kindion mntioned
court
wewcan besmore conpedent iinke
Agee, for graymail leg slat to protect to get
that we won't have to spill we Agency and
a conviction. We are working but at the same
throughout the intelligence community osimplify,that we can and
time strengthen, the basic security procedures
will carry them out. Congress and the Administration are supporting
us in all of these areas. We must staunch tthleaks whichehaveybeenut
spewed over the papers just unmercifOrl and criminally, won't be as capable and
Morocco or intelligence techniques,
successful an intelligence service as we must be.
We are the best intelligence service in the world. You, that way.
goodeverything how ton prto keep it
all of us are dedicated todoing
eserve further as
None of us has a monopolY on I
l
for well as enhancing our advicelgeFromcthebfirsteday I came hereyIuhave
suggestions, for your
alnote wayslguaranteedothat I
invited employees to contact lbutaIsimple
have never guaranteed a response, need your advice.
would read each one. We need your help, we
I appreciate the chance to be with you and say these few remarks
today. Now let us turn to your questions.