REMARKS AT TIME EXECUTIVE NEWS CONFERENCE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00777R000401180002-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 27, 2016
• Document Release Date: April 28, 2014
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: April 18, 1989
• Content Type: REPORT

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Remarks at TIME Executive News Conference
William H. Webster
Director of Central Intelligence
CIA Headquarters
April 18, 1989
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? Thank you very much, Bruce.* It's nice to be introduced by Bruce Van
Voorst. When I think of TIME I always think of Richard Van Voo Vees, who was
the famous voice of the March of Time when I was a child growing up. I always as-
sumed that anyone with a name like that and a voice like that must know what he
was talking about.
I have just a few remarks to make this morning. I really came to welcome
you here and to hear Roz Ridgway and some of the others whom you have
gathered most wisely to talk about issues, and so my remarks will be rather
unstructured and I hope you'll bear with me.
It's such a beautiful morning. I started off in the Rose Garden this morning,
and. it's really fun to report to someone who has had this job before. The
interchange, the requests for additional information shedding light, and the
interaction are stimulating to us.
We send regular briefers to the White House, and I go often to get a sense
of the reaction of the President and his immediate advisors, General Scowcroft
and John Sununu, and to sense whether we are doing our job and whether they
are hearing our message.
We don't make policy. We try to present useful, timely, and objective
intelligence to policymakers so that they can make wise decisions in the interest of
our country. But we do insist that they hear it and that they not alter it, and I'll talk
about that in just a moment.
I want to welcome you to what is called "The Bubble" here, not because it
looks like a bubble, but because I suppose it's symbolic of what we call those
places around the world that have been made as secure as we can make them for
communications in our embassies?we call them "The Bubble."
They often look like bubbles. Occasionally, in the ones I've visited, I've been
required to take off my shoes. This is because there have been diplomats who
have found that when they've sent their shoes to be repaired in hostile environ-
ments, there has been a transmitter placed in the heel or somewhere else. So
shoes are left outside "The Bubble."
???
There is also an awareness in our embassies that we do have things that
cannot be trusted to a conventional environment. I think it makes us all a little
? Bruce Van Voorst, national security correspondent for TIME.
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more conscious of the importance of intelligence and counterintelligence, the
hostile target working against us.
Well, this is an interesting time to be in this profession and all of the related
professions, including the diplomatic profession, from whom you're going to hear
today. Things are happening in the world that many would not have anticipated,
and this is requiring all our best efforts. These events require all our capabilities?
our human intelligence, our signals intelligence, and our imagery intelligence?to
make sense out of what is happening and, where we can, to anticipate, both on a
near term and on a long term basis, what is apt to come from those areas in which
ordinary intelligence has heretofore been denied us, except by the most active
clandestine efforts on our part.
The elections last month in the Soviet Union are a good example of that.
These were the freest elections in the Soviet Union since 1917, and citizens really
had a chance to express their happiness or discontent. I think of the prominent po-
litical figure in Leningrad who was defeated without opposition. When I was a
young lawyer, we used to say that the one thing we feared the most was losing an
uncontested divorce suit. In the Soviet Union, people are expressing the fact that
perestroika has not yet become real to them. They are not seeing the benefits of
economic reform in terms of the food on their table and other quality of life
improvements, whereas they are grasping quickly the opportunities of glasnost to
express themselves.
And we are seeing that all over the Soviet republics?the Baltic, the
Armenian and Azerbaijani states, and more recently indications of similar activity
in Georgia and in the Ukraine.
It is an exciting time for those who have followed Soviet events to try to un-
derstand what all this means. I agree with Henry Kissinger, who contends that in
many cases Gorbachev does not really know what he plans to do next. He is stir-
ring the stew, creating opportunities for new solutions, without what we would
consider to be a long-term game plan. And so it makes it more difficult for
intelligence experts to anticipate?and we get a lot of pressure from the White
House and other places to anticipate?what he's going to do next.
We're not bad at forecasting. We may know he's likely to announce some
unilateral troop withdrawals or some unacceptable quid pro quos, such as giving
up Cam Ranh Bay and Subic Bay?things that have kept him in the political
limelight, given the aura of detente and reasonableness.
40116.
At the same time, we've had great difficulty in predicting with specificity
what he's going to do. And I think one of the reasons is he doesn't know what
he's going to do very far ahead of what he does. But it's very effective.
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We try in intelligence to look not just at political issues, but at economic ca-
pabilities as well. Political issues, though, are important because there is so much
focus on this man and perestroika and reform in the way they're describing.
And with all the arms talks, a considerable amount of our resources are
dedicated to arms control and that companion question, the ability to monitor or
verify arms agreements, which is crucial in terms of congressional ratification of
treaties and public acceptance. This puts the Intelligence Community very much
on the spot as we try as objectively as we can to tell the Congress the level of con-
fidence that we have in our ability to monitor agreements as they are being
negotiated. We worked our way through the INF Treaty. The START negotiations
present enormously magnified problems for us.
You may think that we're spending all of our time on the Soviet Union.
That's not true. Historically, we've spent between 85 and 90 percent of our
resources in this area, and we may be working our way back up to that, thanks to
Gorbachev.
But more recently, the activities in other parts of the world?and you'll hear
about some of that this morning?have commanded a good deal of our attention.
We call those Third World or regional developments and occasionally regional
conflicts. We see them?the events in Africa, in Latin America, in the Far East, es-
pecially in Cambodia. And we're watching economic developments as well.
Bruce mentioned my concern about biological and chemical warfare and the
proliferation of that capability along with missiles in the Middle East, and that is a
major concern. And I surfaced it not to suggest a policy, but to develop an
awareness of what was otherwise being legitimized by silence while the Iraqis and
Iranians were killing each other with chemical weapons. Every other nation in the
Middle East was trying to develop chemical weapons for themselves, because
they saw a good, cheap deal and they wanted to take advantage of it.
Added to the regional conflicts, regional developments, and of course the
main Soviet problem, are the transnational issues of counternarcotics, counterter-
rorism, and counterintelligence. These are taking up a good deal of our time.
We've reorganized the Agency and the Intelligence Community efforts to be able
to produce a better and more timely result for our government, and I think that we
are staying ahead of this curve, particularly the Bill Bennett curve. I want to be sure
the Intelligence Community is ready, willing, and able to serve, because I don't
want to be at the other end of his whiplash when he mounts his bully pulpit to say
what's wrong with what has heretofore been a not too well coordinated drug ef-
fort around the world. We're taking our place in that. We know where we can
help, and the new Counternarcotics Center is the Intelligence Community's
contribution to the effort.
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Well, these are some of the things that are keeping our attention. We are
not just here at Langley. The Intelligence Community is much broader. The
National Security Agency, NSA, has more employees than we do and is doing
magnificent work in cryptology and signals intelligence at Fort Meade and other
places.
We have the Defense Intelligence Agency. The Department of State, INR,
has its own very helpful and useful intelligence and analytical capabilities. And
each of the military services is working to have a better understanding, primarily in
defensive and offensive warfare?we call some of that indications and warnings. I
might take just a minute to mention what I mean by that, because it's vitally impor-
tant and it's geared to some of the things that Gorbachev is doing now.
When Gorbachev says he's pulling his tanks back, when he's removing his
bridge-crossing equipment, when he's taking 500,000 troops back into Russia, he
is telling us that the warning period is going to expand. We are in a much better
position to deal with force structure, with threat, with all the problems that go with
the tension of not knowing when a major assault from the enemy could occur. So
we're busy developing our ability to detect changes, adverse changes, little things
that might signal to our defense forces that the Soviets are getting ready to do
something hostile in our direction. And the military services work very closely with
us.
We call all this the Intelligence Community. I think the Intelligence Communi-
ty is working better together than it has for a long, long time. The leaders of the
Intelligence Community meet on a regular basis, as do the ordinary Intelligence
Community Staff sections, not only to devise among ourselves the manner in
which our overall budget will be applied for the most benefit to the country, but
also to shake out the little problems, turf problems, other kinds of problems to
avoid unnecessary redundancy and become more effective.
We are talking together, and I think we are talking together very well. As a
part of that, we have the National Intelligence Council, made up of National
Intelligence Officers who are specialists in major fields and who produce the
National Intelligence Estimates, which are the broader-gauge look at the major
intelligence problems around the world.
And as a community, we pass judgment on these estimates, reflecting the
differences of view and nuances that each intelligence agency wants to record in
the estimates, putting them where the reader can find them, not burying them, and
then submitting them-to the policymakers, who are asked to read it, to understand
it, to take our material?use it, throw it away, do anything but change it. In that
way, I think the old expression of "cooking the books" can go out the window. I
haven't heard that expression since I've been here, and I don't intend to hear it.
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We want to be as useful as we can in the way I have described. We give the
Congress-1,000 briefings a year, which may come as some surprise to you. It cer-
tainly did to me. And I'm not sure that may not be too many. But it is important
that we be responsive to the Congress and at the same time protect the
responsibility that we have to guard our sources and our methods. It's just a func-
tion of numbers: when too many people know about things that are required to be
kept secret, the risk of such information finding its way into the hands of those
who have a right to print it expands.
And so we are working to make sure that the oversight committees of the
Congress and the Intelligence Community closely coordinate secrets, always
telling the truth, but not telling things that are at greatest risk. I won't go into how I
do that with the leadership, but so far I think it's working.
You are going to hear about East-West relations and North-South relations
from policymakers and intelligence experts, and I hope to be here for part of it be-
cause I'm very much interested in what they're going to say.
And on behalf of the Intelligence Community, I want to thank all of you who
have taken time from your busy agendas and your companies to try to understand
a little more about what is happening in the world and what our major problems
are, so that you, too, can lend some support to us.
Many of you are already providing the Intelligence Community with your
assessments of meetings of leaders and businessmen in other parts of the
world?assessments that would not be available to the ordinary spy, but are
available because of glasnost and other access and business relationships. And
these help us to understand better what is going on in the world, so that we can
make our intelligence analysis more useful to the Administration.
So I want to close by thanking you for what you do for us. Welcome to
"The Bubble."
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