Stansfield
Turner was born in Highland Park, Illinois, on 1st December, 1923.
He entered Amherst College in 1941 and graduated from United States
Naval Academy in 1946. After obtaining a Rhodes scholarship he studied
philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford
University.
During
his service in the United States Navy Turner
commanded a mine sweeper, a destroyer, a guided-missile cruiser, a
carrier task group and a fleet. He also was President of the Naval
War College. Admiral Stansfield Turner's last naval assignment was
as Commander in Chief of NATO's Southern Flank.
In
1977 President Jimmy
Carter appointed
Turner as Director of the Central Intelligence
Agency. He served in the post until January 1981. In recent years
he has worked as a lecturer, writer and TV commentator and is a director
of several American corporations.
Books
by Turner include Secrecy and Democracy:
The CIA in Transition (1985), Terrorism
and Democracy (1991), Caging the
Nuclear Genie: An American Challenge for Global Security
(1997) and Spy Stories (2003).
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(1)
Stansfield Turner, Secrecy and Democracy (1985)
The use of moles is a longstanding tradition in intelligence.
Back in biblical days the King of Syria asked whether there was a
spy inside his own camp when Elisha, using spiritual insight, was
predicting his moves to the King of Israel. Moles, those who spy against
their own country, like agents, have diverse motivations. Often it
s money; perhaps it is an ideological sympathy with the other country's
way of life and disdain of one's own. Our British and German allies
have had a rash of apparently ideologically motivated moles since
World War II. Several, who defected to Moscow when they became suspect,
were especially damaging because they had operated at high levels
for prolonged periods.
Although our record is
better, it is not perfect. William H Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell
were employees of the National Security Agency who became moles for
the Soviets. They fled to the Soviet Union when they came under suspicion
in 1960. We surmise by their willingness to flee that they were ideologically
committed to spying for the Soviets. Other moles who we knew operated
from inside were two U.S. Army sergeants also assigned to the National
Security Agency. They committed suicide in the mid 1960s just before
being arrested for spying. Whether their motivation was ideology or,
more likely, simply money is not clear.
There have been two well-publicized
cases of CIA officers defecting, though both had left the Agency before
doing so. Philip Agee had such personal and financial problems that
he was having difficulty playing his CIA undercover role adequately
and resigned from the CIA in 1968. In his letter of resignation Agee
expressed his admiration for the CIA and his regret at having to leave.
He even hoped he might be able to come back some day But, deeper in
debt and with other emotional problems, he ended up in Cuba. We assume
that he was brainwashed. By 1975 Agee had published a revealing and
derogatory book on the CIA and begun lashing out at his former employer,
primarily by making public the names of those fellow case officers
whom he could remember. We believe he also passed on to the Cubans
whatever
other secrets he recalled. This seems to be a case of the Cubans'
taking advantage of Agee's financial and emotional vulnerabilities.
Both they and the Soviets have exploited him fully. Whether he was
won over ideologically or was simply taken in by the flattery of becoming
a well-known figure is difficult to assess. He has skirted the fringes
of existing U.S. espionage law, and because that law is antiquated,
whether Agee could actually be convicted is unclear. He remains abroad
so as not to bring that to a test.
(2)
Stansfield Turner, Secrecy and Democracy (1985)
Exactly one year after these hearings on drug experimentation, the
CIA was back in the press for another error of the past. This time
it was the prolonged incarceration of a Soviet defector, Yuri Nosenko,
who came to the United States in 1964, a few months after the assassination
of President John F. Kennedy. Nosenko came to public attention in
1978, when a special committee was set up in the House of Representatives
to study the assassination again. Nosenko had been a KGB officer during
the time that Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had lived in
the Soviet Union, from 1959 to 1962. When Nosenko first arrived in
the United States, he was extensively debriefed by the intelligence
agencies. He was especially interrogated about any connection between
Oswald and the KGB. He contended that the KGB had paid no attention
to Oswald. Now, in 1978, this special House committee wanted to review
Nosenko's testimony on that issue. This led to an airing of the disgraceful
way the CIA had attempted to determine whether Nosenko was telling
the truth.
It was the job of the
counterintelligence branch under James Jesus Angleton (whom Schlesinger
had mentioned to me warily) to check on whether a defector was truly
defecting or pretending to defect in order to spy on the United States.
Angleton concluded that since Oswald had worked on the U-2 spy plane
when he was in the US Marine Corps, it was unlikely that the KGB would
have overlooked him entirely when he was in the Soviet Union. There
was, then, cause to be suspicious of Nosenko's story about Oswald.
It appeared to Angleton that the Soviets might have sent Nosenko to
plant a story that would absolve them of any complicity with Oswald
in the Kennedy assassination. Angleton's suspicions were heightened
by an earlier Soviet defector, Anatoli Golitsyn, who claimed he knew
Nosenko was a double agent. In Nosenko's favor, if he were a genuine
defector, was that his knowledge of Soviet intelligence operations
would have been more current than Golitsyn's, making him more valuable
to us than Golitsyn.
(3)
Edward
Jay Epstein,
Who
Killed the CIA? The Confessions of Stansfield Turner (October,
1985)
Although Turner
had had little previous experience in intelligence, he viewed it simply
as a problem of assessing data, or, as he described it to his son,
nothing more than "bean' counting." Accepting the position
of "chief bean counter," he assumed that he could bring
the CIA, and American intelligence, to the same standard of operational
efficiency he had brought the ships under his command. The four-year
effort to achieve this goal is the subject of his book, Secrecy and
Democracy: The CIA in Transition.'
He quickly found, however,
that the CIA was a far more complex and elusive entity than he had
expected. To begin with, the acting CIA Director, Henry Knoche, rather
than behaving like a ship's "executive officer," surprised
Turner by refusing his "captain's" first order: a request
that Knoche accompany him to meetings with congressional leaders.
As far as Turner was concerned, this was insubordination (and Knoche's
days were numbered). When he met with other senior executives of the
CIA at a series of dinners, he found "a disturbing lack of specificity
and clarity" in their answers. On the other hand, he found the
written CIA reports presented to him "too long and detailed to
be useful." He notes that "my first encounters with the
CIA did not convey either the feeling of a warm welcome or a sense
of great competence."- This assessment that led to the retirement
of many of these senior officers.
Turner was further frustrated
by the system of Secrecy that kept vital intelligence hermetically
contained in bureaucratic "compartments" within the CIA.
Not only did he view such secrecy as irrational, he began to suspect
that it cloaked a wide range of unethical activities. He became especially
concerned with abuses in the espionage division, which he discovered
was heavily overstaffed with case officers-some of whom, on the pretext
of seeing agents abroad, were disbursing large sums in "expenses"
to themselves, keeping mistresses, and doing business with international
arms dealers. Aside from such petty corruption, Turner feared that
these compartmentalized espionage operations could enmesh the entire
CIA in a devastating scandal. The potential for such a "disgrace,"
as he puts it, was made manifest to him by a single traumatic case
that occurred in the 1960's, one which he harks back to throughout
his book, and which he uses to justify eliminating the essential core
of the CIA's espionage service.
The villain of this case,
as Turner describes it, is James Jesus Angleton, who was chief of
the CIA's counterintelligence staff from 1954 to 1974; the victim
was Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who began collaborating, with the
CIA in 1962 and then defected to the United States in 1964, and who
claimed to have read all the KGB files on Lee Harvey Oswald. The crime
was the imprisonment of Nosenko, -which, according to Turner, was
"a travesty of the rights of the individual under the law."
It all began in 1964, after Nosenko arrived in the United States.
Turner states that Angleton "decided that Nosenko was a double
agent, and set out to force him to confess. . . . When he would not
give in to normal interrogation, Angleton's team set out to break
the man psychologically. A small prison was built, expressly for him."
(4)
Stansfield Turner, Secrecy and Democracy (1985)
Immediately following World War II, Iran had become a testing
ground in the cold war struggle between the Soviet bloc and the Western
democracies. Mohammed Mossadegh's accession to the prime ministership
in 1951 was viewed in Washington; and London as a threat. Mossadegh
was more anti-Shah than procommunist, but he became increasingly dependent
on the communists. Two of the major power elements in Iran, the clergy:
and the merchants of the bazaar, were still supporting the Shah.
This left Mossadegh dependent
on the masses. Only the communists were able to rally them on his
behalf. The more Mossadegh maneuvered against the Shah, the more isolated
he became from the noncommunists. In May 1951 Mossadegh nationalized
British oil interests in Iran. Later, when the British felt he was
vulnerable, they urged the United States to join in an effort to topple
him. We agreed.
The CIA swung into action
by attempting to persuade the Shah to dismiss Mossadegh, which was
his constitutional prerogative. But the Shah was uncertain whether
he could survive the public protests that might result. It took some
time and numerous emissaries to persuade him to adopt this course,
but he did dismiss Mossadegh, early in August 1953. Mossadegh's supporters,
largely from the left, took to the streets and demonstrated. The situation
became so tense that the Shah briefly left the country. Meanwhile,
the CIA encouraged the merchants and Muslim clergy to organize counterdemonstrations.
Using both persuasion and bribery, the bazaar people brought onto
the streets enough demonstrators to force Mossadegh's demonstrators
to back down. As the tide turned, the CIA urged its contacts in the
army to come down on the side of the Shah. When they did, the CIA
helped bring together a more friendly government, which was waiting
in the wings. The Shah appointed General Fazlollah Zahedi as Prime
Minister, and Mossadegh was finished. During the entire operation
the CIA employed very few people and not much money. The main point,
though, is that conditions inside Iran were ripe for a change. The
Mossadegh government's political base was weak and was susceptible
to being toppled. The CIA simply gave it the final push.
The Agency pulled off
still another successful political action the following year. A prototype
of the Castro revolution of 1956-1959 was developing in Guatemala
under Jacobo Arbenz. The CIA was directed to prevent Arbenz from consolidating
his communist-oriented regime. It did so by convincing the Guatemalans
that a "popular rebellion" was sweeping the country in support
of Carlos Castillo Armas, an anticommunist army colonel then in exile.
The CIA supplied Armas with enough arms for a ragtag army of fewer
than two hundred men plus a few old bomber and fighter aircraft, most
of them flown by mercenaries.
On D-Day,June 18, 1954,
a CIA radio station, masquerading as the
rebels' station, broadcast word that Colonel Armas had invaded from
Honduras. It continued to give reports of the movement of a supposed
five-thousand-man force toward the capital. A bomber dropped a single
bomb on a parade field in the capital, without loss of life. A day
and a half later, as the nearly imaginary invasion force was reported
by its own radio broadcasts to be nearing Guatemala City, Arbenz resigned.
Armas and his few men were flown to the outskirts of the city and
marched in triumphantly. Again, this favorable political outcome required
only a small effort, and, again, the government that was overthrown
was so weak that only a little push was needed.
The public inevitably
learned that the CIA was behind these decisive political actions in
Iran and Guatemala. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a political
campaign speech in Seattle, boasted of the Iranian operation as an
indication of his administration's dynamism and prowess. Such publicity
began to raise concerns, especially in the Congress, about how many
covert actions were being carried out and under whose control they
were. And then the Congress and the public began to learn about covert
efforts that were not very successful.
The most adverse exposure
was a series of revelations about more than ten years of CIA interference
in Chile, from 1963 to 1973. This was one of the most massive campaigns
in U.S. intelligence annals. The earliest effort was an attempt to
shape the outcome of the 1964 presidential election in Chile, when
the CIA underwrote more than half of the expenses of the Christian
Democratic Party's campaign. This support was directed at defeating
the communist candidate, Salvador Allende. It was probably not known
to the Christian Democratic candidate, Eduardo Frei. In
(5)
Stansfield
Turner, Secrecy and Democracy (1985)
The most adverse exposure
was a series of revelations about more than ten years of CIA interference
in Chile, from 1963 to 1973. This was one of the most massive campaigns
in US intelligence annals. The earliest effort was an attempt to shape
the outcome of the 1964 presidential election in Chile, when the CIA
underwrote more than half of the expenses of the Christian Democratic
Party's campaign. This support was directed at defeating the communist
candidate, Salvador Allende. It was probably not known to the Christian
Democratic candidate, Eduardo Frei. In addition to funding Frei, the
CIA waged an extensive anticommunist propaganda campaign, using posters,
the radio, films, pamphlets, and the press, to convince the Chileans
that Allende and communism would bring to their country Soviet militarism
and Cuban brutality. As part of this campaign, hundreds of thousands
of copies of an anticommunist pastoral letter of Pope Pius XI were
distributed. Frei won handily, but allegations of CIA involvement
seeped out.
As a result, the CIA was
reluctant to play as large a role in the next Chilean presidential
election, in 1970. Not only was its role smaller; it did not support
a specific candidate. The effort was directed strictly against Allende
and was based primarily on propaganda, employing virtually all Chilean
media and some of the international press as well. The program failed
when Allende won a plurality, though not a majority, of the popular
vote.
Under Chilean electoral
law, that threw the choice to a joint session of the legislature some
seven weeks later. At the direction of the White House, the CIA moved
to prevent the selection and inauguration of Allende. It attempted
to induce his political opponents to manipulate the legislative election
up to and including a political coup. Some 726 articles, broadcasts,
editorials, and similar items were sponsored in the United States
and Chile, and many briefings were given to the press. One of those,
to Time magazine, reversed the magazine's attitude toward Allende.
The overall effort failed, however, because of the unwillingness of
the appropriate Chilean politicians to tamper with the constitutional
process. Complementing the CIA effort, the US government exerted economic
pressure on Chile, again to no avail. A second approach, entirely
under CIA auspices, encouraged a military coup.
President Richard Nixon
directed that neither the Departments of State and Defense nor the
US Ambassador to Chile be informed of this undertaking. During a disorganized
coup attempt that took place on October 22, the Chief of Staff of
the Chilean Army was murdered. The CIA had originally encouraged the
group responsible, but sensing that this group was likely to get out
of control, the Agency had withdrawn its support a week earlier.
Allende was installed
as President on November 2. Over the next three years, until 1973,
the National Security Council authorized the CIA to expend some $7
million covertly to oppose Allende with propaganda, financial support
for anti-Allende media in Chile, and funding for private organizations
opposed to Allende. Other agencies of the US government applied economic
and political pressure. On September 11, 1973, the Chilean military
staged a coup in which Allende died, reportedly by suicide. The CIA
did not sponsor this coup, but how much its encouragement of the 1970
coup and its continued liaison with the Chilean military encouraged
the action is honestly difficult to assess. With Allende gone, the
decade-long covert action program was phased out.
More was at stake, though,
than covert action in Chile. The coup-related deaths in both 1970
and 1973 and the exposure of the role of the United States in helping
to topple a democratically elected government, albeit a Marxist one,
brought intense scrutiny to the ethics of using covert action to change
the political complexion of other countries. As a result, such covert
action came to a near halt by the mid 1970s.
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