GEORGE BUSH DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE BEFORE THE COMSTOCK CLUB

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-01448R000502310002-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 12
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 8, 2012
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: November 29, 1976
• Content Type: MISC

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George Bush
Director of Central Intelligence
before the
Comstock Club
29 November 1976
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Thank you Sandy for that very warm introduction. In
this job, running I guess the world's largest, maybe not,
certainly I think the world's best intelligence service,
you're kind of walking a fine line between doing some public
speaking and trying not to do too much.. I do a lot more
than Mr.. Andropov, who is head of the KGB but a lot less
than I was used to in some of my previous incarnations and
that's the way it should be. I will say that when I was
invited -- I can't remember who to blame, whether it was.
Judge McBride or Brian VanCamp for inviting me in the first
place -- to come to the Comstock Club where I felt very
honored. I have wanted to do this and of course I am very,
very pleased to be here before one of this nation's most
prestigious forums, I do appreciate the warm introduction.
Sandy, if I would be permitted one personal note, I referred
to the fact that I was an airplane pilot in WW II and just a
little while ago, we had a squadron of 15 torpedo pilots in
the Pacific and little did ?I,' realize that Lou Grab, who is
here today, principal of one of your schools here in Sacramento,
was one of my fellow pilots on that squadron. So I have
a real personal pleasure seeing this guy, after some, I hate
to tell you how many years, I think it's about 32 years.
Both of us were scared to death most of the time but he looks
like he is doing very well over there.
You may have seen the announcement that I won't be in
the job as Director of Central Intelligence very long and I,
of course, won't be alone in the unemployment field. Some
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of you may remember Norris Cotton... (joke).
I don't fear the future at all and I have had one
hell of a past and the most interesting part of it has been the
last year when I've been Director of Central Intelligence..
I wanted to talk to you a little bit and try to answer or dodge
your questions, depending which seems most appropriate} after
I have finished. I say that not altogether facetiously because
some. of them I'm not going to discuss. foreign policy and I
am not going to discuss sources and methods of intelligence
and the reason I am not going to discuss them is because the
law in 1947 said to the Director of Central Intelligence,
protect sources and methods, and don''t go talking at the
Comstock Club or someplace else about them and so if you are
frustrated in your inability to get an answer from me on a
matter on whnxre I feel I will be violating that law, so be it,
and I hope you will be somewhat understanding.
We have in the lobby of the CIA, one of our many lobbies
there, a group of portraits of my predecessors and I was
nostalgically walking by those illustrious gentlemen the
other day,. their pictures,, and I got thinking to myself of
the enormous differences between the role of Director of
Central Intelligence in 1976 and the problems facing my
predecessors, say 10, 15 or 20 years ago and they are great
differences. and thsere is a whole new ingredient involved in
this. job and that ingredient has to do with battling the myths
about the Central Intelligence Agency. People think of us as
James Bond, and all these scary, exotic kinds of things.
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They think that we overthrew the government in Chile. The
hearings showed that that was. not true. but if I read that one
time in the leftist journals I have read it many times.
People have tried to link us. to the Lockheed scandal and
we're not involved. People have tried to link us to the
death of Letelier in Washington awhile back, we're not
involved. Fidel Castro got his story about our being
involved in'the crashing of the plane in Barbados printed all
over the U.S. and this Agency is not involved: Then we were
accused awhile back, not altogether facetiously, by some nut
of capturing two humanoids in the desert of Nevada and putting
them on ice and then releasing them later on.. We did not capture
two humanoids in the desert of Nevada nor-are we the custodian
of the relics. of Noah's Ark, which. we are accused of being, and
so there is a new dimension to this job and we are now a target.
The attacks come, some from the far left. I read this morning
until it threatened to ruin my breakfast a publication
called Counterspy, a vicious mean little journal. Fortunately
it is largely unread in this country but it is. printed in this
country. There are less sinister people who find that in this
nutty climate we are in that you can put the initials CIA almost
next to any allegation and get them printed. We have seen Castro
accuse the Agency very recently of six different things that
weren't true. There is a book out now by the Soviets. called
The CIA Through the Eyes of Americans, and I brought a little
Russian from Pravda and a little interpretation of it
starting off, "not far from the American capital in the quiet
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town of Langley, the headquarters of G/IA, is located on
the marble plaque in the hall of the main building are
engraved the words, 'you will know the truth and the truth
will make you free"', and they are there and we are very
proud of that. And today when the world learns about the
many new facts of indecent activities of the Agency this bible
piety of Langley is understood completely differently. This
is the Soviet official line printed in Pravda, circulated
across, as far as their communication system will present it to
go. Unless, you think that piece that came out in March 25
this year was alone, here is one I just picked up from our
office dated November 25, by the Soviets, Moscow Radio Peace and
Progress in English. This one was funneled to all of
Asia and let me jus-t read you the first paragraph of this:
"The exposures of the subversive activities of the
United States CIA in different countries of the world and the
discrediting of that espionage Agency not only in the eyes of
the American public but also in the eyes of the world public compel
its present and previous leaders to search for a new name for
the CIA."
Now this is the Soviets capitalizing on our own excesses
and we've seen the same thing coming out of Cuba taking some
of the hearings of last year, twisting them around and funneling
them all through1atin America. And so we are up not against
just idealistic people who want to see changes in ... and the
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handful of abuses of the past corrected. We are up against
forces much more sinister, much more dedicated to the downfall
of one of the foremost assets that this nation has, and that is
the foreign intelligence capability second to none. And so we
are a target by these various groups and the ones that trouble
me the most however, the exposes that trouble me the most are
the ones that expose the names of CIA people willing in this
troubled climate to serve their country abroad. And when I see
a book or article that deliberately exposes our operations in
relations with other governments, that deliberately names our
people and their contacts, I have nothing but contempt for
those authors.. Nothing could be more damaging to the interests
of our nation, and of our national security than this kind of
irresponsible exposure. Unfortunately, I have found that our
laws are regrettably weak in being able to do something about
those that. would risk the lives of CIA people serving abroad
by exposing their names. Secrecy is required to protect our
methods, our officers serving abroad and their contacts in
foreign land and to protect our relationships with friendly
foreign intelligence services. But I challenge those who claim
that secrecy in intelligence work is inconsistent with freedom
and democracy, to give us a realistic preview of what this nation's
freedom and democracy would look like if we decided to abandon
this essential protection against our adversaries. We recognize
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at the same time that along with secrecy, accountability is
important, accountability to the President, accountability to
the Congress, accountability to the people, We've got to replace
this suspicion with trust and I want to assure you that loyal
Americans in ;our intelligence agencies are conscious of these
responsibilities. We are indeed accountable to the elected
representatives of the American people.. Last winter, the
President promulgateda new Executive Order -- the major
restructuring of the foreign intelligence capabilities of the
United States since 1947. We are following that Executive
Order to the letter. There is an intelligence oversight board
where if anybody perceives or thinks he sees something wrong, he
can go directly without going through the Director of Central
Intelligence or any superiors to this board for action. We've
expanded our Inspector General area to do a self-policing job.
We have expanded our Office of General Counsel both in. the CIA
and my responsibilities as Director of Central Intelligence
for those defense elements that play such an important part
in the whole intelligence community. We have very thorough
Congressional oversight. I report to seven different committees
of the U.S. Congress. I've made in the seven months that the
Congress was in session that I was Director, I made something
like 40 separate appearances on Capitol Hill, official
appearances. That doesn't count the times when you are up
there negotiating with the chairman or the ranking members or
whatever it may be. There is adequate oversight, there is a
myth abroad that nobody knows how much money except for the
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Director and maybe the President how much money the CIA
spent. Every single penny of the intelligence community
budget and every single penny of the CIA budget is reported
to the proper committees of Congress and they are not going
to be as long as I am Director, reported to the people because
I don't believe that you can lay out the innermost secret
details of our intelligence and still have an intelligence
capability that is meaningful and both houses of Congress
voted 2 to 1 to have us report to the committees but not make
these budget figures public. And that's the way it is and
that's the way I believe it should be.
So to summarize -- the problem is how to deal with some
of the lives that we encounter that came as I indicated from
some of these publications, like Counterspy, how to deal with
plain false stories that are not maliciously conceived, When
laying them to rest, often can only be done through disclosing
highly sensitive information. That's the dilemma that I find
myself in as Director of Central Intelligence and it is not an
easy one to answer..
Now I have dwelled on some of the myths, some of the
problems we have today that did not necessarily confront my
predecessors yesterday but lestl.I leave you with the wrong
impression the. myths are only a part of it. That's the
bad news, you might say and the good news though is here as
well. The Central Intelligence Agency is strong; recruitment
is up and the cynics all say, oh, we've got 7% unemployment,
therefore, people would work anywhere. They would go to CIA
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or anywhere else. We have a way of measuring quality as
anybody does in the personnel business and quality of those
dedicated young people I'd say willing to serve their country
in this way, that quality is there. And so we continue to
attract young people with character, scholarship, ability and
I think that this really is the best guarantee that we are
going to have an effective and capable intelligence capability
in the future. We have recruiters back on the campus. You
talk about those who needed combat pay, CIA recruiter going
to campus a couple years ago really merited same but now they
are back there being civilly received, attentively listened to
and doing a first class job. Another good point, frankly, we
still provide the policymakers with the best foreign intelligence
in the world. You know you read a lot.about covert action,
Chile, Castro's beard and all these nutty things, some of
which were true and wrong, most of which were allegations
without any factual base but you hear that. Seven Days of the
Condor, CIA people running all around, Robert Redford, Miss
Dunaway in New York City knocking each other off, etc. Totally
fallacious, targeting the Agency because of this sensationalist
climate that we are living in but you don't know about our....
what we are doing in the field of international narcotics
because it is extremely sensitive, that we have a tremendously
useful role to the policymakers in letting them know about
the international flow of narcotics around the world. I don't
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know whether you care about nuclear proliferation or not.
I had a neat Thanksgiving with 4 of my 5 ,kids and sudden.;ly
I started thinking about that kind of thing and I can tell
you that this.Agency that I.proudly head does a very good job
informing the President of the United Stages of who has the
nuclear capability and who doesn't and when you think that the
technology is such that you can have a nuclear weapon in a
b'ief case, we'd better have a foreign intelligence capability
trying to keep up with the movement of nuclear materials
around this world. International ter,rorism,.I don't know
how many of you travel abroad, or who even think about whether
you need to worry about a whole new ingredient, international
terrorism, something this country never even thought about ten
years ago. But it is my Agency,, the intelligence community
that has to do the best we can to keep up with this dreadful
new weapon that some of the more radical countries have,
namely the stimulation of international terrorism. We all
want to see peace in this world, we all want to see some
agreement, reasonable agreement with the Soviet Union,, Until
everyone is convinced that nobody is going to lie and nobody
is going to come short of the truth, we had better know what
the Soviets are doing. We better know how far their missiles
can go. We better know how many they've got; we better know
what their complying with, the SALT agreements and that's
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the responsibility of the Director of Central Intelligence
to report these things to the President, the Secretary of
Defense, Secretary of State. I don't know whether anyone
in Sacramento gives a darn about Cubans in Angola; it's a whole
new ingredient in foreign policy; it's a whole new phenomenon
Cubans spreading out into many countries in Africa. What's
it all about? I care about it, the President of the
United States cares about it and it is our Agency that is
charged with trying to inform the policymakers of not only
how many there are in how many countries but what their intent
is, what does this new thing mean.. Are the Soviets behind it
or not, these are the questions we have to answer every single
day.
I served a fascinating term as Chief of the United States
liaison office in China. I forget who said the Chinese were
inscrutible but he was right, whoever it was and it is awfully
hard to figure out the changes that are taking place but it is
our Agency, it is our intelligence community that I head that
has to report on these things to the President of the United
States. You hear of covert action. Incidentally, covert
action accounts for less than 2% of the CIA budget. Covert
action is never entered into unless it is fully approved by
the Operations Advisory Group, Secretary of State, Secretary
of Defense, head of the NSC, Director of Central Intelligence,
two advisers present, the Attorney General, and the head of
OMB, Office of Management and Budget, and a finding made by
the President of the U.S. and then briefed to 7 committees
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on the Hill and that is very different than what I think
some of the concept here is about how covert action is used.
I happen to believe that we need and the Congress found this,.
stopped well short denying the President, whoever he may be,
of the need of having the covert action capability. I know
that we need one. But when you think of that, when you
think of James Bond image, you know that we have many hundreds,
well in excess of a thousand Ph.D.'s and M.A.'s working at
the Central Intelligence Agency, enough to staff a first class
university. Producing intelligence and science, agriculture
of the Soviet Union, OPEC price increases whatever it may be,
economic intelligence, second to none in the Central Intelligence
Agency. Our scientific and technical capability is unparalled
and then the last thing I would say and perhaps the most
important, this Agency has been through an awful lot. As I
said there was a handful of things over many administrations that
went wrong. I'm not here saying they didn't. There was a
barrelful of allegations that never were wrong where we were
totally innocent but the main asset, as we live through these
very difficult times, was not covert capability, not our science
and technology,, not our production of intelligence second to
none but the dedication of the people who work in the CIA and I've
been in business, I've been in politics proudly, I've been in
non-partisan jobs such as Ambassador to the United Nations, and
head of our office in China, and I have never been associated
with people who have taken more heat with more style and with
more dedication to their country than the people I work with now
in CIA. Thank you very much.,
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