EXCERPTS FROM REMARKS BY GEORGE BUSH DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AT THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-01448R000502320001-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 13
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: April 26, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: December 14, 1976
• Content Type: MISC

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EXCERPTS FROM REMARKS
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
AT THE
CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
DECEMBER 14, 1976
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George Bush,.Director of Central Intelligence, said today
in a speech before the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce that the
Central Intelligence Agency~J-a' "national asset which must be
preserved as a vital part of the American defense system."
Mr. Bush,who recently announced he would be leaving his
post on January 20, said the "intelligence information and
analysis provided the President and the policymakers by the
Intelligence Community is indispensable in preparing this nation
for any eventuality in international affairs."
"I think one of the greatest dangers to this country would
be to allow an organization such as the CIA to be weakened by
those who seek to discredit and destroy it," Mr. Bush stressed.
"The daily job of collecting, distilling, and producing first-
rate intelligence for the President does not make headlines,-but
it is essential if we are to be alert and have adequate warning of
international trends and events."
Mr. Bush said one of his constant concerns in the past year
has been the protection of intelligence sources and methods. "I
am charged under the law with protecting our methods of operation.
To say that secrecy in foreign intelligence work is inconsistent
with democracy is to ignore the importance of defending our freedom
against determined and unscrupulous adversaries. Our allies and
friends abroad will not work with us if we are not serious about
this."
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r '. L
"'At the same time, we recognize the importance of account-
ability -- being fully responsible to Presidential direction and
to Congressional oversight. No director of the CIA today could
possibly tolerate any abuse of the integrity of the foreign
intelligence process."
Mr. Bush, who was appointed to his position in January 1976
by President Ford, said he has been gratified by the profession-
alism he h'. found at CIA. "It is important that the American
people understand the intricate job the CIA is doing in an
increasingly complex world. It is essential that we have the
support of the American people," he said. The Director referred
to such aspects as Agency reporting and analysis on world wide
economic intelligence, the monitoring of the SALT agreements, and
the threat of international terrorism.
The Director of Central Intelligence said the Agency continues
to attract quality applicants with advanced degrees, necessary for
modern intelligence analysis and estimation. "This is just one
more indication that the young people of this country support
the need for a good foreign intelligence product to help our
leaders reach the appropriate decisions," he said.
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GEORGE BUSH
Address to San Antonio Chamber of Commerce
December 14, 1976
-- ..- Spa
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GEORGE BUSH: Thank you, Mr. Langley, for that warm intro-
duction. To you and Doris, my congratulations as you finish this
very complicated terms as chairmen. The vibrations in the cocktail
room in there were all very positive, I can report to you. And we
CIA people are no longer in the domestic business, but if we were,
I suspect we would have been able to authoritatively report on the
good work that you've done.
About a year and a half ago I was out at the Peking Zoo,
when I was the equivalent of Ambassador to China. Standing next
to me was Paul Atherton (?). We were looking at the pandas, and
the pandas were looking at us, and I don't think any of them
thought that Paul Atherton would be'soon returning to be the next
Chairman of the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce.
[Laughter]
But nevertheless he is. He'II do a good job. He's a man
of dedication and goodwill. As his predecessors and other predeces-
sors before him, he has deep conviction about the free enterprise
system. And if he starts to foul it up, Flo will straighten him
out. Anybody that can run Trinity with this firm hand can also
find time to boss her husband in running the Chamber of Commerce.
But I am delighted to be here with both of them. They
are my longtime friends, and it's a great pleasure.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention -- Ralph already did,
but Chick Kazen, with whom I served in the United States Congress,
a great congressman and a very able representative, a man who
understands the need for a strong military...
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[Applause]
And I was so pleased to see Mr. Zachary get this special
award tonight. I don't want to sound corny about it, because I'm
on the verge of coming back to Texas to live again, but I -- each
of us, you know, has kind of business heroes, I guess. I remember
30, almost 30 years ago, 25 years ago, in West Texas, and the name
H.B. Zachary was known to all us young guys striving away. And I
think there's a certain symbolism to Mr. Zachary. There's a few
other great Texans like him who epitomize the free enterprise
spirit.. And I was so privileged to be here tonight to see-you,
Ralph, very fittingly make that award to him.
[Applause]
And I also want to thank the people from the San Antonio
Theater who did their number up here tonight. You know, in Wash-
ington we're so -- one of the neat things about coming home is
you get so sophisticated up there. And this was a lovely program.
The band, the Air Force band was neat and the John Marshall High
band was just right, and this performance befittingly commemorating
our Bicentennial and the things that we revere was also very decent.
And so I was glad to be-here for that. And I also want to
pay my respect to the military here. In my job, people say, well,
you know, they think of it as head of the Central Intelligence
Agency. That's just a part of it. I also have another hat, which
is Director of Central Intelligence. That's the name of the title
but it includes the whole intelligence community. And that means
Air Force, Army, Navy Intelligence, it means Defense Intelligence
Agency, it means the National Security Agency, it means FBI, it
means ERDA, it means the INR and the State Department.
And one of the happiest things that's happened to me in
government service over the last 10 years has been my affiliation.
in this most recent job with the,military.::And so I -- they're
dedicated, they got, not so manyiyears ago, a bum rap from.the
American people. I think we've come to our. senses now. And any-
body who has access to a fractional part of the information I
have access to in my job as Director of Central Intelligence better
know that we need a strong and dedicated military.
[Applause]
...had the pleasure of meeting General Roberts and General
Burdette and others here tonight, why, it was for me a great, great
pleasure.
TonightI want-..to talk to you -- Hope told me to be rather
brief, and I' I I try . But I do want to talk to you about,--,-not--
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about the Chamber and its terribly important role in free enter-
prise, but I want to talk to you about the real Central Intelli-
gence Agency and its terribly important role in the freedom of
this country.
I won't be in this job long, but it is out of business --
Congress, the United Nations, chairman of one of the great parties,
Ambassador to China, equivalent thereof. I can tell you it's the
greatest job I've ever had. The public contrary -- the public con-
troversy to the-contrary notwithstanding. And I do want to try to
separate out in a few minutes tonight the myth from the reality.
I said I wouldn't be long in this job, but I'm not the
only one looking around. One of the United States Senators, after
serving a long time in Washington -- his wife got used to sitting
at the head table and everything, and she didn't want to leave
Washington. So he went down to the unemployment office and he
said, "Look, I've got a very nice pension from the Senate, but,"
he said, "I wonder if you could find me some part-time or even
fulltime work. I'm not choosy at all."
And she said, "Oh, well, Senator, I'm sure we'll be able
to locate something."
Nothing happened. Two weeks later he went down again.
"Have you had any luck?"
And she said, "No, nothing has come along, sir, befitting
your standing."
He said, "Well, I'm not fussy."
But two weeks later he went down again -- nothing. And
the third -- couple or third visit he went back, and he said, "Look,
I'll take anything."
She said, "Well, we have nothing, sir, befitting a man of
your standards, your station."
At that, the phone rang. And she said, "No, I don't
believe we'can help."
She held her hand over. She said, "It's the zoo. The
gorilla died, and they're looking for somebody to fill in, wear
a gorilla suit and fill in until the new gorilla arrives from the
western part of Nepal."
He said, "I'll take it."
She said, "Well, it's beneath your...."
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He said, "I'll take it."
So he put the gorilla suit on, went out to the Washington
zoo, and sat in the corner trying to -- you know how they. are, those
gorillas, just scratching and everything. And he began to get into
the spirit of it, began to like it a lot. And so a high school
class came in by and threw some peanuts at him, and he'd grab them
and eat them away, you.know, and scratch some more.
And one day a junior high class came by, and this old
senator grabbed ahold of the trapeze and started swinging on it,
and the crowd cheered, the kids cheered him, you know. And he's
swinging and swinging away, and landed in the lions cage.
Well, the lion came charging over at this senator, and he
backed him, backed the gorilla into the corner. And finally the
guy just said, "Well, I can give up," you know, he says, "Help.
Get me out of here."
At which the lion turned to him and said, "Would you shut
up. You're not the only United States Senator making a living in
this zoo."
[Laughter]
And so, as ,I contemplate the future, I won't be alone.
I want to mention something about the CIA. In Langley,
Virginia, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency --
Hopes been out there and others have. Most people find it -- had
Mike Wallace out there the other day. You know, 'the guy that focuses
in on you; if your eyeballs move, you look like you're guilty.
Well, actually.-- he's really a good guy, though.. And he
came out to -- he came out to CIA; and after he was only there about
15 minutes, and he said, "George, if only the American people" --
he wanted to get his cameras in beside all the secrets, you know.
He said, "If only the American people could see the CIA as it really
is, I think they'd support it more fully."
And I agreed with him, but I didn't want to let him,get
his cameras in, taking pictures of all the people there, anything
like that.
--
But he had a point, and it is different than what the myth
the reality is very different from the myth. And in the lobby of the
CIA there's a portrait gallery of my predecessors, people that have
been privileged to be Director of Central Intelligence. And the
other day I was walking by this gallery, and I was rather nostal-
gically looking at it, and I got thinking how different the problems
are today that I face as Director of Central Intelligence than the
problems they faced. It's not that the job is more difficult,
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necessarily, but they didn't have the problems of trying to run in
public a foreign intelligence business that should be run not in
private, but should be run quietly and out of the front pages of
the papers.
The job is different, because today you have, in addition
to a public perception problem, you have an enormous amount of out-
side work with the Congreess, the oversight problem.
We are battling many myths. People think of the Central
Intelligence Agency as kind of a James Bond operation: covert side,
clandestine side, the secret and the spying side. You ask some kid
in high school about Chile, and he'd say the CIA overthrew the
government of Chile. And it didn't. It's been investigated over
and over again. But there's this public perception problem.
Since I've been Director, I've seen in the press: "CIA
was linked to the Lockheed scandal in Jana." And we're not, and
I've so testified under oath in the United States Congress, and yet
it's printed and reprinted again.
Regrettably, the other day an ex-Chilean diplomat was
assassinated in Washington, and..the head of the Oversight Committee
of the United States Senate, Senator Inouye, got many calls that
night suggesting that the CIA had been implicated in the death of
Mr. Letelier in Washington, D.C. We weren't.
Castro, Cuba, the other day, comes up and makes an alle-
gation of six charges against the Central Intelligence Agency, none
of which was true, including the knocking down of a plane in the
Barbados, saying that the CIA was involved in it. We weren't.
And yet that's printed and reprinted, not just in our country, but
all around'the world.
And just to carry it to its ridiculous extremes, we're
also accused of capturing three humanoids in Nevada and putting
them on ice. Well, we didn't do that. I don't know what a human-
oid is, but [unintelligible] we didn't have anything to do with
it.
[Laughter]
We're also accused of harboring and secreting away the
relics from Noah's Ark. Believe me, it's printed. We did not
harbor away the relics from Noah's Ark.
And so, all of this, and many, many more stories that hit
us, make me conclude that the Central Intelligence Agency is now,
compared to the times that my predecessors served, is now a,target.`
And the attacks come from the far left in our own country. There's
a magazine that I hope most of you don't read called Counter-Spy.
It's vicious, it's mean. The only good thing about it is that-most
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people don't read it. And it insists on recklessly printing the
names of Central Intelligence Agency personnel serving abroad.
The attacks come from the Cubans. Castro's allegations
I mentioned.
The attacks come from the Soviet Union. A book called
"CIA Through the Eyes of Americans," picking out the most vicious
untruths from the hearings of the past year or year and a half,
you might say. This book summary was written in Pravda on March
25th, 1976, blasting the Central Intelligence Agency and knocking
the hell out of the FBI. And then on November 25th of this year
in Moscow, a thing that they call Radio Peace and Progress, in
English, beamed to Asia, came out with all kinds of garbage about
the Central Intelligence Agency. A germ of truth surrounded by
a disease of lies.
The Cubans picked up the most outrageous allegations,
against my agency out of these hearings, allegations unsubstan-
tiated and that no senator would endorse, printed them and fun-
neled them all through Latin America as a part of the Cuban pro-
paganda.
So for those of us who think that this is a nice little
effort to reform an agency, all I ask is please open your eyes,
please understand the kind of times that we're living in.
The CIA is a target, now, at home by sensationalists, by,
as I indicated, the dedicated left. Counter-Spy is but a small
manifestation of this. Abroad, by hostile foreign governments.
There was recently an anti-CIA meeting in Jamaica, where Agee, a
former CIA employee, came down there, financed uncertain ways.
Two thousand people making some allegation that the only way, if
you're going to reform the -- the only way you're going to reform
the CIA is some kind of dramatic change in the U.S. Government,
and much, much more serious allegations than that.
And so, almost daily around the world, this agency that
is tremendously important to the freedom of the United States is
under attack. We're a target.
Nothing can be more damaging, in,my view, than this willful
conspiracy to name the names of agents and the names of CIA employees
who are willing to serve their country abroad. Nothing -- I can
think of nothing more despicable. And I think that one of the great
dangers to our country would be to allow an organization such as the
CIA to be weakened by those who are simply determined to discredit
and destroy it.
The daily job of collecting, distilling and producing first-
rate intelligence for the President doesn't make headlines, but it
is essential if we are to alert and have adequate warning of inter-
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Our laws, unfortunately, are weak. Secrecy is required
to protect our methods, to protect our officers serving abroad and
their contacts in foreign lands, and to protect our relationship
with friendly foreign intelligence services around the world.
One of my great concerns over the past year has been the
protection of sources and methods. The law says, and the 1947 law
very clearly, to the Director of Central Intelligence, "You're sup-
posed to protect the sources and methods." I am charged with the
law by doing this. But to say that secrecy and foreign intelli-
gence work is inconsistent with democracy is to ignore the impor-
tance of defending our freedom against determined and, frankly,
unscrupulous adversaries.
So, putting it simply, our allies and our friends abroad
will not work with us if we are not serious about this.
At the same time, we recognize the importance of accoun-
tability. It's essential if the CIA is going to have the support
of the American people that we live within the law, that we are
responsible to presidential direction, that we are responsive and
responsible to congressional oversight. No Director of the Central
Intelligence Agency today could possibly tolerate any abuse of the
integrity of the foreign intelligence process. And so it calls for
a sensitivity to the rights, the constitutional rights of Americans,
at the same time being sure that our foreign intelligence capability
is not weakened.
And so I want to assure you, loyal Americans, that the
intelligence agencies are conscious of their responsibilities and
we are indeed accountable to the elected representatives of the
American people and we are living within the law.
There's an Executive Order that came out, the first major
reform of intelligence since 1947, and we're adhering to -- crossing
every T and dotting every I in that order. We have inside the
Executive Branch an oversight board to which any member of the
intelligence community or anybody outside who says we're doing
wrong can take complaints. We report fully to the National Security
Council, on which I sit. We've expanded our Inspector General and
our General Counsel's office. All of these things to safeguard
against abuse.
And we report --.1 report to seven congressional committees.
I've been in this job for 10 1/2 months, and I've made 48 official
appearances on Capitol Hill reporting to congressional oversight
committees. We report, public opinion to the contrary notwith-
standing, every single penny of the intelligence budget; not to the
people. You can't do it and do what the law says: protect sources
and methods. But we report it in full to the oversight committees
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of the Congress, to your elected representatives,.every penny.
And yet I read in the paper over and over again, "Nobody knows
what the intelligence budget is except the head of the Central
Intelligence Agency."
And so, to summarize, the problem is how to deal with lies,
how to deal with stories that are just plain untrue, when laying
them to rest often can only be done through disclosing highly sen-
sitive information. I'm called on every single day of my life:
How do you prove a negative? "The CIA is doing this." And when
we're not doing it, how do you prove you're not doing something?
And that's the kind of climate that we're living in, or have been
living in, today.
But these myths I've mentioned are only a part of it.
That, in my view, is the bad news. The good news is here: The
agency is strong. Recruitment is up. We continue to attract young
people with character, scholarship, and ability. And this is just
one more indication that the young people of this country support
the need for a good intelligence product so that our leaders can
reach proper decisions. And our recruiters, their lives intact,
are back on the campuses in the United States. And I think the
And I think the main bottom line, as they say, is that
we still provide the best foreign intelligence in the world.
People have the James Bond image...
[Applause]
People have the James Bond image. But let me just throw
out a couple of`categories at you. Father of five kids, concerned
about international flow of narcotics. And just who do you think
provides the most important intelligence on the flow of international
narcotics around the world and into this country? The Central In-
telligence Agency and the intelligence community.
I'm concerned about terrorism. When the state of the art
is such that an atomic bomb, quoting a Deputy Secretary of Defense,
can be fitted into a briefcase, given our technology, I'm concerned
about international terrorism. And who do you think it is that has
to advise the President of the United States on the international
movement of these terrorists around the world, what their designs
are, hopefully trying to predict before chaos is wreaked, lives are
lost? It's the Central Intelligence Agency.
I'm concerned about economic intelligence. We have the
best economic intelligence in the entire United States Government.
You might say, "What difference does it make whether the Soviet
grain crop this year is big or little?" It makes an enormous dif-
ference. It affects the price of bread in San Antonio, for one
thing; it affects the welfare of our agricultural output all across
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this country; it affects our maritime unions; it affects Eastern
Europe; it affects NATO and the military commanders. It's terribly
important. And the Central Intelligence Agency -- I'll make this
plain -- has better than any other agency of the United States
Government, can tell the President of the United States what the
Soviet grain crop is going to be this year.
OPEC. On top of the news tonight. Is there going to be
a price increase or not? I think our record on predicting OPEC
moves in terms of price, of raising the price of international oil
has been second to none.
Cubans in Angola. And you might say, "What difference
does it make whether Cubans in Angola are in 30-some, whatever it
is, countries in Africa?" Terribly different, terribly important
to us. Here's a whole new phenomenon of Cubans who some say still
cling to the fact that they're just, you know, people overcoming
some of the difficulties of the past. Why are they in many countries
in Africa? What does this mean? Who's paying the bills?
Policymakers have got to have this kind of information if
this country is going to be alert and totally aware of the new, pres-
sures that are happening around the world. And the Central Intelli-
gence Agency and the intelligence community is in the forefront of
reporting that kind of thing.
I'd like to be able to tell you that we could predict
accurately these changes in China that are going on. And believe
me, it's significant what happens in China. It's significant as
to whether China moves closer to the Soviet Union. You don't have
to be a`three- or four-star general to understand that if there
should be some rapprochement between those two great powers, why,
the whole balance in the world, the pressures on NATO would change,
the pressures on Japan would change, the pressures on our remaining
free allies in Southeast Asia would change enormously.
And so, predictions, difficult though they may be in a
country as inscrutable and hard to predict as China, are terribly
important. And again, it's our agency that has this responsibility.
Nuclear proliferation, more and more countries getting
nuclear weapons. Some say, "We shouldn't meddle. We shouldn't do
anything that would interfere in some other country." I think it's
terribly important, in terms of nuclear proliferation, that our
country is aware -- this country, the leader of the Free World, is
aware of what the pressures will be if other countries....
[End of recording]
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