REMARKS BY WILLIAM H. WEBSTER DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE BEFORE THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00777R000302410001-4
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 13
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 30, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: October 28, 1988
• Content Type: MISC

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REMARKS
BY
WILLIAM H. WEBSTER
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
BEFORE THE
AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION
WASHINGTON, D.C.
OCTOBER 28, 1988
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Thank you very much Ed. I appreciate your referring to my visit as a rare
treat and not a rare trick or treat. Well, I'm very pleased to have a chance
to come here and share some thoughts with you. It is gratifying to see public
sector lawyers interested in improving their management effectiveness.
In private practice I used to attend a number of programs on economics of
the bar and there was really one central underlying theme at these programs --
how to make more money or how to net more money. Today, you're here to
discuss ways to provide more effective service to the government and to the
people; it's an impressive purpose.
I don't know how well we're doing as lawyers -- somebody gave me a pin the
other day that said "Lawyers eat their young." It's always in the eye of the
beholder.
I'd like to take a moment to share a story that is going around in the
Soviet Union now that perestroika is taking effect. The President is
collecting these stories, so we pass them to him if we think they are
reliable. One of them concerns a. representative that Gorbachev sent out into
one of the Ukrainian states to see how perestroika was getting along. He went
to one of the small villages and asked to see the mayor. After talking to the
mayor for a moment he said, "Do you have any television sets in this
village?" The mayor looked at him and said, "Of course we have television
sets. There is a television set in every hut in this village. In fact, there
may be two television sets in many of these huts." The representative said,
"That is very interesting. What about refrigerators?" And he said, "Of
course. We all have refrigerators." The representative looked him in the eye
and said, "Do you know who I am?" And the mayor said, "Of course I do. Who
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else but a CIA agent would come into a village with no electricity and ask
questions like that?"
I have to confess to you that the last time I directly managed a group of
lawyers was in 1960, 28 years ago, as United States Attorney for the Eastern
District of Missouri. I am very conscious of that as I approach the subject
of my talk, so I am going to steer clear of modern management techniques. I'd
like to talk to you this morning primarily about how I view some things and
share a few experiences with you as a "user" of public sector legal
services -- on the bench, at the FBI, and at the CIA.
A word about lawyers and modern intelligence. The day before yesterday I
had the privilege of dedicating a statue in our Headquarters foyer of General
William F. Donovan, Wild Bill Donovan, who headed the Office of Strategic
Services during World War II. I couldn't help thinking that this man had left
a lucrative law practice -- somewhere between $800,000 to $1 million a year in
current dollars -- to work as a dollar-a-year-man throughout the war setting
up the OSS.
In the 41 years of the Central Intelligence Agency's history, only four
out of the 14 Directors of Central Intelligence have been lawyers: Allen
Dulles, Bill Colby, Bill Casey, and myself. But we account for 18 of the 41
years, for better or for worse. I have always thought of myself, and taken a
good deal of comfort in my own position, as a private citizen on loan to his
country.
I took that theme from my personal role model, John J. McCloy, who
rendered such conspicuous service during World War I and World War II. He
served as Assistant Secretary of War during World War II and then as High
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Commissioner for Germany, coming in and out of government as required. Both
Donovan and McCloy were active in very prestigious firms. The firms let them
go, and they let them come back again.
I believe that when you are appointed to a position in government -- as
opposed to being a member of civil service -- survival is a matter of
conditioning yourself to leave. You do your best work when you're prepared to
leave tomorrow, and I remind myself of that every day when I head out to
work. This doesn't mean you want to go, but you're prepared to go. It means
you will not compromise anything that is important in terms of your ethics or
responsibilities, nor will you support any policy that you believe is
unconscionable. I think you do better work under those circumstances and I've
been grateful to Mr. McCloy, who is now in his nineties, for having passed
that concept on to me. And this, concept went a little further. Mr. McCloy
said that there are really three kinds of people in public office: those who
are elected and serve for terms; those who are career employees; and those
like myself, who, are on loan. I think, it is fair to say that those of us on
loan act as bridges. We bring private sector points of view to government and
that builds on the expertise and the experience of the career employees of the
executive branch of government. We need all three, and I think today we do a
pretty good job with all three.
Although I still think of myself as on loan to the government, it has
become a long loan. It has been about 18 years now, and I have had the rare
privilege of seeing the law and engaging in the law in most of its
dimensions. I have found it to be like Shakespeare's definition of
Cleopatra: "Age cannot wither her, not custom stale her infinite variety."
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And every assignment that I have had has increased my appreciation for this
country, for its citizens, and for its system of justice which guards and
protects us all.
My first loan was voluntary, but just a few steps ahead of the draft in
World War II, and I stayed in the reserves and was recalled in the Korean
War. I mention this because in being recalled to duty I went from $200 a
month to $225 a month, a slight increase in my compensation, so you could
hardly call it a sacrifice. I went to see Dean Prosser, the great dean of
authority on torts as you recall at the University of California, on my way
out to the Pacific to ask him how I could best keep up with my legal
experiences and keep up with what was going on. I was tremendously afraid I
was losing out with my peers by going off to fight that war. He assured me
that the law didn't change that fast and we talked about it at length and
finally settled on something that I thought was very useful. I took U.S. Law
Week, CCH Labor Law, and CCH Taxes with me -- areas that were most likely to
have things happen to them while I was overseas. And I studied them
religiously on shipboard. I found when I got home that while I was learning, a
good many of my peers were hauling collection papers up to the magistrate's
court. I was every bit in front of the problem with them. It worked for me.
The first assignment that I had as a public sector lawyer was on my own
ship. One night the captain rounded me up -- we were still in Pearl Harbor --
and he said that four members of our crew had been arrested on the beach by
naval investigators. He asked if I would go represent them. So I went down
to the brig where they were being held and I had to pound on a lot of doors.
This was post-Escobedo and pre-Miranda and just about a month or two before
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the Uniform Code of Military Justice came into effect. And I finally
persuaded the investigators that I had a right to see them, to see my new
clients. When I got in there I said, "Have you told these men that they don't
have to answer any questions?" And one investigator said, "Well, we've told
them that they have certain constitutional rights." And I said, "Well did you
tell them that those rights included the right not to answer any questions?"
Shortly after I was able to represent them I went off to Korea, and was
anchored out in Japan when I got a series of letters. The captain laid a
letter sent to him on my desk and said, "You write the answer and I'll sign
it." It had gone from admiral to admiral to admiral, from the Commandant of
the shipyard to the Commandant of the Fourteenth Naval District to the
Commander Service Force Pacific Fleet and it said: "Due to Lt. Webster's
interference. we were unable to obtain a confession." So you can imagine the
kinds of letters that I wrote, and tore up for not being sufficiently
respectful. I finally did make my point, the captain signed it, and in an
agonizing period for me because mail back and forth took so long, back came a
letter through all the channels from the Commander Service Force Pacific Fleet
that simply said, "Lt. Webster had done no more than assure to those men the
rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States." And I was
relieved by the conclusion of the letter, which said, "No further action." I
still have that letter.
The captain then tried to keep my status as a lawyer from being widely
known, but from time to time they'd be stuck as we were on the island of Guam,
and I found that there was a lot of sluggishness in developing independence
for lawyers carrying out their responsibilities in court martials. The
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general attitude was "I wonder what the commanding officer wants us to do in
this situation." And I'm sure that there have been permutations of that in
your own work, about what the boss wants you to opine in a given situation.
In fact I was in Sasebo Harbor the day the Uniform Commercial Code came
into existence, and the admiral was so exercised he wouldn't even use the
radio; he sent signal flags up summoning the commanding officers and the
executive officers over. For the first time in naval history, a captain's
mast was reviewable by somebody else and they were all saying, "Well, damn,
I'll never have another captain's mast." And they did and it's working fine
and we got through it. But there was that kind of resistance.
I had a friend who came through Pearl Harbor when I had returned there.
He said he'd been appointed to represent a defendant on his ship in a court
martial. He was sure that he had been appointed because he knew nothing about
court martials and asked if I could help him. I did help him but under the
kinds of resistance that made me feel we had a long way to go. The
authorities said they didn't know whether my friend could have anybody off the
ship as a co-counsel. We went through that process to establish he could have
anybody he wanted. Then they said, "Well, we don't know when we are going to
this, we're going to have the court martial at sea when we're doing exercises
this week." And I said "Fine, my ship's in dry dock, when do we leave?" We
ended up trying that case at midnight one night and I was able -- because I
had prepared for the case and I don't think the others had -- to help my
friend's clients. They were acquitted -- they had to be -- all the evidence
had been thrown out. The problem was that my friend didn't thank me because
he got 70 requests to represent him from onboard ship immediately after that.
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Well those are the kind of reminiscences that came to mind as we were
talking and I thought I might share them with you.
One of the things that I think is important for all of us in the
government sector to keep in mind is how much the public looks to us in terms
of trust and responsibility. The public observes how we conduct our business,
and this affects their view of government and the way it operates. You may
recall that Arthur Vanderbilt, the great justice from New Jersey and founder
of the Institute of Judicial Administration, spent the last part of his life
trying to improve the traffic courts of this country because in his view, and
I think he's right, that's where the rubber hits the road for most people in
their exposure to our judicial system and he wanted them to come away with a
good feeling about it. I was reminded of that when I was sworn in as Director
of the FBI, when President Carter said that he could think of no agency in
government that had more to do with how American people felt about their
government than the FBI. When it.did well, people felt good about the
government and by implication when it went astray, it undercut the public's
sense of justice.
And so during my nine years there I tried to underscore at every possible
level the importance of understanding a simple, single mission there -- to
uphold the law. And I'guess I ended 75 percent of my speeches with the
commitment that I made at the time I was sworn in; that we would do the work
that the American people expected of'us in the way that the Constitution
demanded of us. That involved more lawyers. We only had about 1,000
lawyers. At the time people used to say to me, "Is it true that the FBI
employs only lawyers and accountants?" And I would say, "No, it's no longer
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true. I'm not sure it ever was true." And they said, "Well, why isn't it
true?" I brought the number back from 1,000 to about 1,400 over the length of
time we were hiring people, and we weren't employing very many. We
strengthened the amount of legal training that all our Special Agents got at
Quantico, starting with the Constitution; required another 16 hours of legal
review in every field office in the country; had a principal legal adviser, an
agent who was a lawyer in every one of the 59 field offices; and a very strong
and good General Counsel's Office in Washington. In addition to that, I
carried with me the concept of the elbow law clerk that I enjoyed for eight
years on the bench. I had two special assistants who applied for those
positions much as one would apply for positions as a law clerk, and they
served an average of two years and then rotated out. I have been delighted to
see the quality of experience that they've had since that time, both in the
private sector and in the public sector. A number of them have gone to the
best firms in Washington and other parts of the country; some are now partners
and are continuing to reflect credit on their experience and on me. Three of
my special assistants have become assistant U.S. attorneys, and three have
published books. They are probably the best kind of representatives that the
FBI could possibly ask for.
Going back to my experience on the bench for a moment, I found that
government lawyers on the whole were dedicated, well prepared, and really
understood the law applicable to their cases. I also found that they were
fair in their approach and this is important to this public concept of justice.
In the rotunda outside the Attorney General's office, carved in the wood
is a statement which I attribute to Frederick Lehmann, a former Solicitor
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General who happened to come from my home.city of St. Louis. It says: "The
United States wins its case whenever justice is done one of its citizens in
the courts." And I have found uniform quality, in terms of that approach, in
criminal law. The end goal in presenting a case forcefully and effectively is
that justice may be served, rather than just obtaining a conviction. I think
that has also been true in the civil litigation that I had occasion to judge
where government agencies were represented in court.
When I moved from the FBI to the CIA, I took many of those concepts with
me. Like the FBI, CIA was under attack as a result of the Iran-Contra
affair. When I came to the FBI it had been under attack because of the
break-ins that had taken place in the early 1970s. The safest way, the best
way, really the only to way to deal with that is to renew our pledge of
adherence to fidelity to law and fidelity to the Constitution.
I'd like to regress again if I may to the FBI, where we used those lawyers
that I described to make sure that our most sensitive cases were done
according to law. Not just the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act cases,
not just the Title III's, but the undercover cases that were just beginning to
find dimension and utility. We were beginning, through guidelines, to define
the parameters of what was appropriate in those cases.
You may recall the ABSCAM cases, among the first to hit the front pages
because they involved congressmen. We were under tremendous attack because of
those cases. But every one of those cases was affirmed on appeal for the
following reasons: because we had used the Department of Justice; because we
had used U.S. attorneys in working out the scenarios; and because we had in
many cases placed U.S. attorneys in closed circuit television situations where
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they could watch the crime unfold. The attorneys could make a call to the
undercover agent, telling him to step back or go forward and guide him in what
he was doing. Every one of those cases was affirmed on appeal. Fourteen
times they tried at the Supreme Court -- turned back every time. And I
attribute that to the fact that we kept our lawyers close to us, and I try to
do that at the Central Intelligence Agency. We have a fine group over there
and they have many, many responsibilities. They deal with the sensitive
cases, the sensitive surveillance issues to be sure that they're handled in
accordance with the law.
Our lawyers have a wide range of responsibilities worldwide -- real
estate, personnel, contract work, memoranda of understanding, all the
disciplines. I'm moving the Office of General Counsel back to our
Headquarters in Langley because I think we need our lawyers closer to our
clients. We're putting them right next to the Inspector General's Office so
that there can be interplay between the Office of Inspector General and the
Office of General Counsel. We've just recently settled a case and I think
it's a tribute to the quality work of our Office of General Counsel. I'm
referring to the Orlikow case, which involved psychiatric treatment by a
Canadian psychiatrist whose work was supported in part by a grant from a
foundation established by the CIA. This case was settled with a reasonable
concern for liability, a reasonable concern for the victims, a reasonable
recognition of the difficulties of trial, and a reasonable amount to be paid
by the government. I think that those negotiations were conducted with great
skill and in cooperation with the Department of Justice. We had about one or
two days of publicity instead of two or three months of aggravation that could
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only have adversely affected the Agency. So, I think it was in the best
interest of all concerned and justice was certainly done to innocent victims
who knew nothing about what was taking place.
We work with many other General Counsel's offices. To mention just a few,
the National Security Agency, the State Department, the Army, the National
Security Council, the Intelligence Oversight Board, and the President's
personal counsel. This brings home to me that in this government of laws you
and I are providing the glue that holds our system together.
If I had any words of advice for you, it would be simply this -- that the
private sector pays for advice, corporations and individuals pay for advice
and because they are paying for it they listen to it. You want to be sure
that your government hears you and that is a responsibility that you must
accept even if the client is not all that anxious to do so. I'd urge you to
be what Harry Truman called a "one-armed lawyer" if you can. You know that
story: "On one hand this is the case, but on the other hand . . ." In
government, we need to hear both sides, but we need to know what you conclude
and how you get there. It's important that you understand the concerns of
your clients, but don't try to trade places with them. There are important
differences between lawyer and client. Help them to find a way through their
problem if you can. Give them a solid basis on which to act or not to act.
I have talked at. length about serving in the public sector. But the
greatest blessing of my professional life has been the privilege of working in
harness with men and women of integrity -- first in the Navy, then the bar, on
the bench, in the FBI, and now at the CIA. Throughout my career, I have
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worked with people who are not preoccupied by fame or fortune, but who see
public service as a way to pursue their highest aspirations for a better world.
As I was preparing these remarks, I thought of a photograph and quotation
that appeared on the cover of the St. Louis Bar Journal when I was its editor
in, the early 1950s. It showed a young lawyer -- perhaps a law student --
sitting in a courtroom, behind the judge's bench, looking off into the
future. And the quotation, which I selected from Judge Learned Hand, said,
"Descended to us, in some part molded by our hands, passed on to succeeding
generations with reverence and pride, we at once its servants and its masters,
renew our fealty to the law." Those are wonderful words, and they are still
deeply meaningful to me. And perhaps that is why I was so grateful when you
invited me to be with you today.
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