ADDRESS BY STANSFIELD TURNER , DCI, TO THE USNA CLASS OF 1947

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00498R000200140017-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 8
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 27, 2007
• Sequence Number: 17
• Publication Date: November 13, 1980
• Content Type: REPORT

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1 ess by Stansfield Turner
C- ,cter of Central Intelligence
.co the USNA Class of 1947
ThL:rsday, 13 November 1980
It seemed appropriate to describe to you how one of your own friends and
classmates can change your life. It all started for me on the 2nd of February
1977; I was sitting peacefully in my office in Naples minding my military naval
,.business over there. The phone rang and it was the new Secretary of Defense,
Harold Brown, whom I did not know. He said, "the President would-like to see
you tomorrow in Washington." I said that is nice. He said, "I can't tell you
what it is all about." So, I hung up the phone, called in my aide and said
would you get me on the next plane to Washington. I then asked the Chief of
Staff and my closest advisors to come and and said, "Troops, the boss sent for
me tomorrow; I don't know%lhat it is about, but let's war game this thing--I
don't know if I am being called in for an interview to see how I stack up with
other people; let's see what should my answers be, if he is going to tell me to
do somehing--in which case what should my answers be, etc."
We went through various military possibilities--the Chief of Staff said.
well, you know Sorenson just flunked the course for CIA--I said, oh my God,
what do I say if he offers that to me. The Chief of Staff looked back at me
and said, "Stan, he wouldn't do that to you." We skipped the answer to that
question and war gamed the rest of it. The aide came running back in and said
if we work hard we can just catch the Concorde out of Paris tonight and but
is
of course it/against all the government rules to take a foreign airlines. I
said, Butch, no President has ever sent for me before--let's go first class.
Some of you may know a fellow out of '43 named Dave Bagley; he had just arrived
in Naples in a Navy jet; my aide commandeered his jet, flew us to Paris,
walked on board the Concorde the minute they opened the door and I arrived
here at Dulles Airport 8 hours and 45 minutes from talking to Harold Brown.
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I got up the next morning and went to see Harold Brown; I got an appointment
with him but I was a little concerned because I noticed the appointment they
gave me was 30 minutes before I was due in the Oval Office; trying to-get across
the river and all that and then maybe 10 or 15 minutes with Harold Brown, whom
I did not know. As I walked in to see him, he said sir it is nice to meet you
but the President has got something he wants to ask you to do and he'll tell
you about it. I said oh, okay. I'm pretty thick at times, but as I got in the
car going across the river I said to myself--you know, if the Secretary of Defense,
whom I don't know, doesn't want to meet me and get to know me, you know, I'm not
going to a military assignment. So, I thought about the Chief of Staff's remarks
and I had about ten minutes to conjure up what my answer would be.
Well, I walked into the Oval Office; here was our classmate, very, very
warm and friendly, and ah, I don't know, well, I.,... He has remained a very
warm and friendly person throughout the tremendous responsibility given him these
last four years; but he was very warm to me and took me into his private office
with the Vice President; sat down and all of a sudden I found myself pretty
dazzled, as a matter of fact, but I was being lectured by the President of the
United States about what I great guy I was and at the end of it came the CIA
punchline. Well, I looked back at him and said, "Mr. President, if I really do
have the capabilities and qualities you have been so generous describing, I
could do you a lot more good in the military because you need those certain
qualities there--I'd like to stay where I am. Well, it really was an interesting
experience in retrospect but I just sat there and I kept hearing him say, CIA.
I was sort of dazed, you know, but all I could tell that was coming through
that he wasn't changing his mind. I finally said to myself, this next two or
three minutes is the last chance you have to drive any kind of a bargain in
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this deal. He said, you know I want you to run the whole intelligence
community, not just the CIA--that's what your job is. So I finally said
Mr. President I don't think there is enough authority for anybody to run
the intelligence community. I didn't know beans about the job of intelligence.
He said well, you're in charge of the budget committee for intelligence. I
said, Mr. President, being in charge of a committee in this city gets you
absolutely nowhere. Six months later I had charge of the budget.
I walked out in a real daze because I could sort of see those thirty-some
years of naval career just sort of going across the screen there but that just
wasn't going to use them, build on them, but you know, each of us in our own
walk of life, those of you in the Navy, etc., you develop a concept of ambitions,
desires, what you want to do for the organization, company or whatever it is.
I, of course, had those up the kazoo, and I'd come on that airplane thinking
about what I was going to tell the boss I would do when I got the chance. But
now I saw all that going down the drain and some new challenge coming up.
Well, what does it mean. What's it been like? What did our classmate
throw me into? I think the first thing that strikes me in retrospect is the
depth of antagonism toward CIA that I found in the country, the media of
course, at that time and it really did take me by surprise, clearly. I knew
CIA wasn't popular, but the degree of animosity, the degree of irrationality
what
total inability to get the press to understand/the absolute necessity of the
kinds of secret activities we have to do was quite a change from the--you know
we were pilloried in the military for a while during Vietnam, but really nothing
this
of/took on and meant that I felt a great responsibility and made a great effort,
and frankly, tried to put my own personal reputation on the line to rehabilitate
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the Agency's name and reputation, because it really was important for the
country.
A second characteristic of what I found was that the CIA is very like
the Navy; very like the military. It's most responsive.. A little anecdote.
You know when you out to a public place to speak and you have the podium.
Some are high, some are low and I like to be able to look at my notes without
having to spend time looking down. So I asked the Agency one time-- I said
look fellows, I want a little gadget, sort of like a moveable parallellogram--
you know those things we used with our nagivation--so that I can get up to the
podium and I can slide my paper up as high as I can get it--you see what I mean.
Just build me a little something. In two weeks I had a kit. I couldn't even
carry it. It was machine-tooled. I never even used it. It was so complex
the point will put that paper anywhere you want. I stopped asking for many
things after that. But they really are responsive; they're dedicated. And
single
I would say they are at the Agency, the/most talented group of public servants
in our country. I really think man-for-man, woman-for-woman, they have really
got quality of people there, It's wonderful in that respect to work with them.
But, I'd found our classmate had thrown me into something that was quite
different than the Navy. CIA had grown. It's a very young organization--it
had grown out of the OSS and it really was disorganized. It didn't have a
management sense. It was running the fifty-yard dash, only now we were working
on a long distance run. We were old enough and we had to be able to do the
long distance and we hadn't prepared the management foundations for a continuing
operation. We were living off the fat of super people who had come in in the
past and we didn't have a personnel management system that was sure we brought
in the right, best young talent at the bottom; then we challenge them adequately
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adapted to the morays of the youth today who want to be challenged differently
than you and I wanted to he challenged in '46 and ensure that everybody in the
Agency thought he had an opportunity to use his talents; and we've done a
great deal in the last three and a half years. The great help I've had from
the wonderful deputy I was lucky to get, Frank Carlucci, former Ambassador and
and former Deputy at HEW, and we've instituted a much more systematic, centralized
personnel management system.
The other big difference, but not entirely difference from the Navy, was
CIA has been three, very decentralized operations. We have the spy department,
we have human spies, we have a technical spy department with satellites,
photographs, signals, other equipment, the kind of places that invented the U-2
and then we have an analytic department that tries to take a product from all
these and bring it together. But, because of the inherent and the importance
of secrecy in an organization like this, particularly in the human spy department,
there was very little communication between these three and you can't really
tolerate that today. You can't go out because you're a spy and get something
at great risk that you could get with a photograph. You've got to be working
together, talking together. You can't have analysts wanting to know what the
grain harvest in Poland is going to be this year when the grain harvest people
are analyzing what it's going to be in the Ukraine. I'm just trying to make
things up, but you've got'to really be tied together and the decentralization
was worse from'the Navy's submarines, aviation and destroyers,
much worse. And that's a fact. But we've worked a lot on trying to bring the
management together. I deal with the subordinates there as a corporation now.
I deal with them as the top of these departments and a couple of others who are
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managers as a team, as a committee, as a group. (Inaudible)... I'm making the
decisions but it used to be they were dealt with individually by the Director
and things were isolated from each other. And if the Agency made mistakes,
and it did make some mistakes--not nearly as many (inaudible), it was not
because people were dumb or foolish, or malicious, it was because it was so
compartmented that a fellow who was overzealous did more than he could legally
do, or should have done, to get away with it because there wasn't enough check
and balance. You can certainly go too far in the other direction because if
you proliferate this very sensitive information too far, obviously you're going
to have leaks and problems. So we're trying to find that compromise between
a corporate decisionmaking structure, with some compartmentation within it--
they don't all need to know everything that we are doing in the innermost
detail, but enough so we get a check and a balance on each other. So we've
made a lot of progress there and it's been an interesting challenge.
I mentioned that-the President asked me to run the Community--which is
statutorily and had been since 1947, a second job for the head of the CIA.
Entirely separate, to bring together the Defense Intelligence, the State
Department intelligence, the National Security Agency and so on. Boy I tell
you, when the boss threw me into this one, I was a buzz saw. First of all,
he said, "Now take charge of this place." Well, a few Directors had tried it
a little bit, but not very much and a few Presidents had walked right up to the
brink of giving the Director more authority. Jimmy walked up to the brink and
he gave me the budget authority I mentioned and gave me one additional authority
over what we call tasking--telling the people who collect intelligence what
they are to collect on and what their priorities are. But he didn't go all the
way.and give me the full authorities you really would have to have to run it
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like you'd run a ship. And trying to ease some of that authority and power
away from the barons who run these other organizations is no easy task. Now,
on top of that, look at the position that I'm in. If I'm going to get the
Agency, the CIA running loyally and enthusiastically behind me I've got to
be their advocate out in front. If I'm going to run the Community and get
all those barons to cooperate and work under my direction as a team, I've got
to be seen not to be an advocate of the CIA. So, it is a far different
situation than being in the military in this respect where you have broader,
cleaner lines of command. I don't want to overstate that because there are a
lot of problems and contradictions there, too, but I think this is a very
difficult and unusual situation where you try to be things to two different
constituencies at the same.time when there is so much conflict between them.
I am pleases, however, because there is good will in all these organizations
and I don't want to overstate the degree of distance and problems, but there
has been real progress in bringing our Community together and there is a large
climate of opinion within the Community that we need to work together better
and I think a lot of progress has been made in that direction: But, all I'm
saying is when our classmate picked me up and threw me into this pool of'
alligators, I didn't quite appreciate these problems of public antagonism
and the need to restructure the Central Intelligence Agency for the long haul
in terms of its management procedures and the difficulty in playing both of
the roles that he gave me.
Let me wind up by saying that I'll be eternally grateful to him for having
put this confidence in me and having supported me thoroughly during the four
years and for having let me have this opportunity to serve the country with
expanded horizons with a whole different perspective that I never would have
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had if I had stayed in the Navy. I miss the Navy; I regret not being able to
complete some of the things I had hoped. to have completed there, but this has-
been aschallenging, exciting and rewarding as anybody could possibly ask for
and I am grateful to Jimmy Carter for making it available and for his leadership
during these four years. It will go down of course, the Presidency, to be judged
by history and all of us have different opinions of it today. Let me assure you
that I have watched him first-hand, watched him very closely and the one thing
that you ought to give him real credit for is that he is an honest and upright
and dedicated a man as anyone knows. He has tackled tough ones; hasn't won them
all; in retrospect people will say Jimmy Carter shouldn't have tackled this or
that and should have tackled another one, but he sure has given it a try. We
can be proud of him and proud of our class and let's look to Jerry to carry
the flag on in the future.
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