Moderator: Walter H. Pincus, correspondent, The Washington Post
Speaker: R. James Woolsey, vice president, Booz Allen Hamilton, director of central intelligence 1993-95
Speaker: William H. Webster, partner, Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, director of central intelligence 1987-91;
Speaker: Stansfield Turner, admiral, U.S. Navy (retired), director of central intelligence 1977-81

Council on Foreign Relations
New York, N.Y.
May 12, 2004

PINCUS: I'm not used to seeing this many people in the morning, usually just my wife and a dog. [Laughter.] And we have a conversation over The [Washington] Post and The [New York] Times and The Wall Street Journal. So I'm trying to think of this as an extension of that, without my wife, who does most of the talking. Let me open it up the way you're supposed to, which is, if you’d turn your cell phones off. I'd like to remind the audience this meeting is on the record, although I guess I can't take notes. And we'd also like to thank HBO for its sponsorship of the program and, I guess, giving breakfast or something to all you people. We will have a Q&A session. I'm going to carry on for about 25 minutes, or 20 minutes. But when that starts, if you would wait for the microphone and state your name, your affiliation and a question, and everybody always says "Not a statement," but I think— it always is fairly loose. So please keep it concise.

I'm here with three people that, I guess, over the last 25 years I've written about. They probably remember much more clearly than I do what I said. But in the old days, most people didn't like what I wrote. And some people today don't. But you learn to live with it. And I gotten to know over the years all three of them, I think, fairly well. And they're men who served their country in what I think is one of the most difficult positions somebody can ever have. And each one of them went through a crisis period when they were director of the [Central Intelligence] Agency [DCI]. And what I've asked them to do, sort of briefly, is to recall that period and, sort of, how they handled it, how it looked like to be in a crisis and be on the inside of it and head of an agency where you can't really talk about what you're doing. They've all gone through periods in which people want to have changes in the agency, reform. And there hasn't been a lot of reform, but there's a lot of reform talk, and we'll get to that afterwards. And then, with this brief, sort of opening, I have some questions about what's going on today. And then, we'll turn it over to you. But if I could ask Stan Turner, who was DCI under [former President] Jimmy Carter, to start it off. What was— you came in right after the Church-Pike committees [Senate and House select committees that in the 1970’s examined intelligence gathering by U.S. government agencies], came in at a time when there was real turmoil, and you made changes which people resented. What was it like?

TURNER: Even though I came in well after the Church committee concluded, you and others every morning were tearing the CIA apart in the press. There were still exposures coming out. I had a real concern that the agency could lose its standing in the country, and its credibility, if we made more mistakes, so I tried to set up a series of controls against that. I established thresholds of activity— how much money we'd pay an agent; whether we'd recruit an agent inside the Cabinet of another government or something, that had to be cleared with me so that we had some control over it. I tried to take better control of the assignment of personnel. The professionals really didn't think that an amateur DCI should have control of that, and I insisted on selecting the people for the key assignments overseas, for instance. I was draconian when it came to the rules, and when I found people deliberately breaking the rules, and in some cases lying to cover it up, I was adamant they had to be dismissed, leave the agency. It was an opportunity, it seemed to me, to establish us so that we didn't get into trouble and have more problems with the press and the American public, because I just didn't think we could maintain the credibility of the organization if we made mistakes again.

In the course of an amateur taking control of a very professional organization called the Directorate of Operations, there was a lot of resentment, because either they'd had directors who hadn't bothered to try to take control, or they'd had directors who were one of their own before, and therefore they trusted them. But they didn't think an amateur could make those judgments. Yet I felt that clearly was my job; that that's the way our government runs. We put amateurs in at the top of almost all of our organizations. [Laughter.] And I was there to make those political judgments, what kinds of risks we should take in the name of getting better intelligence for our country. It created a lot of resentment. One of the things I did to try to get a handle on the organization was I used a technique I'd used in the Navy, which was to call together groups of younger officers and have a bull session with them. And when I did that with younger officers from the Directorate of Operations, I found they had a consistent complaint. They were being over-supervised, over-managed, and that was the residue from [the war in] Vietnam when there had been a huge buildup in the Directorate of Operations. We just had too many people around. And I found there was a CIA-generated study which said we had 1,350 too many people in the organization, in the Directorate of Operations. And I went, and— after studying it, decided to cut it to 832— made a reduction of 832 spaces. Only 17 people actually walked out the door. The others left by retirement or voluntary change to a different part of the CIA. And the important part was that none of the 832 spaces were overseas, where you do the spying; they were all in the [CIA] headquarters in Langley, Virginia. That was resented very much on the part of the Directorate of Operations, and the idea that somebody could actually take charge of them, but in the long run we had no scandals. We had no problems of the nature that the Church committee had uncovered from years past, in the four years of the Carter administration.

PINCUS: Let me add a footnote before we go on to Judge Webster, which is that in a conversation I had preparing for all of this, I talked to someone who rose fairly high in the agency in the DO, in the Directorate of Operations. They still resent to this day what you did, how you did it. And there are people who would tell you, and they believe it, that some of the problems of today are rooted in the fact that there were changes like that made. It's an agency that has a long history, a long memory. As you think in the future about making changes, particularly in the DO, it is a very closed society, people who feel very deeply. And going from one generation to another, they feel outsiders don't understand their problems. And so one of the things that at least this person— and I have some real respect for him— said is that as you think of changes, you better get them originating from people who have been there. Judge Webster. [Laughter.]

WEBSTER: Was that a question or an invitation?

PINCUS: Well, I was letting you just sort of put your --

WEBSTER: All right. Well, my crisis in credibility and trust, I think, was waiting for me when I got to CIA. I'd had a similar experience when I joined the FBI nine years before, in the wake of what were called the black bag jobs [illegal burglaries to set up surreptitious wiretaps and surveillance], which no one can remember now but were considered to be the subject of violations of the Church committee and Pike committee investigations that Stan has referred to. The Senate wanted me to promise to investigate allegations of disregard of the three Boland act amendments having to do with providing non-humanitarian aid to the contras in Central America and to start a new investigation. This was during my confirmation proceeding. And I declined to do that, because I think, like everyone coming into a new job, you want to get on with the job and not engage in archaeology. But I said I would review all of the investigations and commissions, and take appropriate action. I made that as a promise. And I brought with me, out of private practice, again, a special assistant who had helped me so ably at the FBI. And he took on the business of collating all of the reports and gathering the information for me in the allegations and the charges, and then proceeded to look into those charges in a very professional way and then, at the conclusion, giving everyone who came under scrutiny an opportunity to meet with him and to discuss their point of view or their defenses or to point out any errors in his findings before they met with me. In the end, the result was very similar to the one in the FBI. I had been given 48 agents to discipline, and I took the position that I wouldn't discipline them for what they had not been told was contrary to rules. There are rules that they should have understood. Those that tended to fall— the consequences tended to fall on the supervisors, who had failed in their responsibility. In this case, a number of non-humanitarian packages had been delivered to the contras in Central America, largely through White House— people in the White House asking that it be done. That was part of the Colonel [Oliver] North era.

And I looked at those from the point of view of was a rule broken, a rule that existed at the time, or an obvious responsibility that existed at the time; or was this a new concept of what a person should or shouldn't do? The supervisors who let these things happen and who violated existing rules within the CIA were disciplined. Two were put up for dismissal, two were reprimanded, one was demoted, and several other actions were taken. And a number of charges were not brought forward because they were not substantiated under that standard of forewarning. Then I took the actions. I met with some of the people who were involved; some were out of the country. Then I went to the bubble, the auditorium at Langley. It was an open session and I gave my reasons— what I had done, why I had felt obliged to do it. I renewed my support for the agency and for the people who were putting their lives on the line around the country, but expressed the importance to the issue of trust and confidence that we take action where people knowingly violated the rules. And I would take some comfort that later on, one of the men— there were people who came there pretty heated up because they thought the new fellow was coming in and messing around with a very precious commodity and we were trying not to do that. But he said, “You know, I sat there and my wife was there, and she turned to me and she said, ‘You know, he's right.’” And that gave me a sense I was getting through what the purpose of this action was.

And then I took it one step further, because the crisis was in credibility. People in the Congress had begun to feel that— the CIA— if you had came to testify and you didn't ask the right question, you wouldn't get the answer that you were looking for, or that you would get a disingenuous response as they were protecting sources and methods. So we introduced something called the four C's to go with the forewarning principle. The four C's were that all testimony before the Congress must be correct, candid, complete, and consistent. And we took it one step further, said there'll be things— you'll see people in the room and you will believe it's inappropriate for you to respond to the particular question that you have. Don't be cute about it. Don't be disingenuous about it. Say you have an answer, but you're not authorized to give it. Say that you'll return to headquarters and headquarters will work with congressional staff so that their responsibilities and our responsibilities can all be met.

And from that time forward, I don't recall a single instance where Congress accused the agency of lying or dissembling during the period I was in office because we held to that principle. And out of that I think came— my conclusion, when you're dealing with these kinds of crises, that the importance of truth in building trust is paramount and that you have to work at that every day and that everyone in the organization has to understand that; that you will protect on a need-to-know basis sources, methods and things that you're sworn to protect, but when you tell the truth, it will be the truth. And I think we got through that one and several others along the way simply by adhering to what I think are fundamental principles in dealing with people.

We also looked around for people to address the press and public affairs. You didn't— very few people that I ran into at CIA joined the CIA to be a public affairs officer. [Laughter.] It was kind of the other way around! And so I utilized one of the outstanding officers at the FBI, who immediately enjoyed the trust and respect of people in the agency to get off to a good start. And later I found that there were talented officers inside the CIA who could carry out that responsibility and understood what we were trying to do.

PINCUS: One reason I wanted to do it this way is because I think the crises that have led up to today have been totally different than what you're seeing now. What you're seeing now in the calls for changes in the agency is failure in sort of analysis; failure in being able to see what's going on; failures to, supposedly, predict 9/11; and failures to be correct about [the presence in Iraq of] weapons of mass destruction. These are not the crises that we faced before. We did have other mistakes, but they never reached the point where— and I'll get Jim [Woolsey] to talk about the final one, which refocused everybody on sort of counterintelligence, and that is the Aldrich Ames case [in which Ames, a CIA agent, was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union], which dominated the CIA and set a whole different view about how it operated.

WOOLSEY: A few weeks before I was asked to be director of central intelligence, in early December of '92, I gave a speech at the World Affairs Council in Washington and said that we'd been struggling with a dragon for 45 years, finally killed him, and found ourselves in a jungle full of a lot of poisonous snakes, and that the snakes could kill you just as much as a dragon could. What I had in mind was terrorism, proliferation, international organized crime and the like. I didn't know at the time, of course, that one of the most important of those snakes would be named Aldrich Ames. A short time into my tenure in '93 the very professional counterintelligence work that had been going on for a couple of years under Paul Redmond and Jeanne Vertefeuille and Sandy Grimes at the CIA in full cooperation with the FBI after mid-'91— not before. But because they started working with the bureau and because they were so good, we got a very good idea that not only did we have a mole, but that it was Ames. And the FBI's very professional work throughout the first part of '93, going through Ames' garbage and all the rest in order to get the material they needed for the right kind of warrant, eventually made possible an arrest in February of 1994.

My own role in this is somewhat colored by the fact that in the fall of '94, when that little Cessna airplane crashed into the South Lawn of the White House, the White House staff joke was, that must be Woolsey still trying to get an appointment with [then-President Bill] Clinton. [Laughter.] I had two semi-private meetings with the president in the two years I was DCI. I went to all the National Security Council meetings— almost all. But those were pretty good-sized meetings in the Clinton administration. So it was widely known by the time I was dealing with the Ames case that Woolsey was not part of the inner circle. As a matter of fact, 15 minutes before our press conference back in December of '92, when I and the others— [Defense Secretary] Les Aspin, [Secretary of State] Warren Christopher— were to be announced, [White House Press Secretary]Dee Dee Myers said something to me, and she said, "Admiral, you know, I didn't know you served in the Bush administration, as well." And I said, "Dee Dee, I'm not an admiral; I never got above captain in the Army." [Laughter.] And she said, "Whoops, we'd better change the press release." [Laughter.] So, you know, I think probably somebody up there thought they were re- appointing Stan, and they kind of— (laughter)--slipped up and got another guy. But in any case, the overall position that a DCI has in dealing with a crisis like this— and certainly, my own ability to deal with it— was definitely colored by that arrangement and relationship. I didn't have a bad relationship with the president. I just didn't have one at all. [Laughter.]

The arrest of Ames was done under circumstances in February in which the FBI and I had agreed that we'd announce it in a joint press conference. [FBI Director] Louis Freeh decided not to do that at the last minute, and the bureau announced the arrest. And rather quickly thereafter, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator [Dennis] Deconcini [D-Ariz.], began an approach toward dealing with the Ames case which effectively took the position that the CIA had not cooperated with the FBI at all, that this had been completely an FBI operation, and that full responsibility for all counterintelligence, including foreign intelligence operations to penetrate foreign intelligence services overseas, should be transferred to the FBI. None of us knew at the time, of course, that [FBI agent] Robert Hanssen [who spied for the Soviet Union and Russia] was sitting there in FBI Washington headquarters, quite ready and willing and able, should that have been done, to have turned over all American information about foreign counterintelligence to the Russians. But nonetheless, that overall campaign by Senator Deconcini, which we eventually thwarted— and my back still has the dagger marks in it— was a centerpiece, really, of dealing with the Ames case.

Early in the process, right after Ames was announced, the arrest was announced— and I couldn't do it before that because I didn't want to alert anybody to the fact that we thought there was some need to change our counterintelligence operation— I convened a panel under Jeff Smith, a later general counsel of the CIA under [director of central intelligence in 1995-96] John Deutch, and they came up with an excellent set of recommendations to better coordinate and centralize counterintelligence and security at the CIA. Of course, one of the big problems, the way Ames got away for so long, was that the people who knew about, say, his drinking didn't know about he price he paid for the house, and those people didn't know about some of his other problems. Counterintelligence and to some extent security had been heavily decentralized in the CIA over the years, partly as a reaction to the extreme centralization that it had undergone in the '60s and early '70s. And it was a very decentralized operation, and the circumstances in which Ames was able to do what he did beginning in '85 were that there was an extremely decentralized treatment of counterintelligence and security at the agency. We did pull that together; not totally under a czar the way it had been under [CIA chief of counterintelligence James Jesus] Angleton back in the '50s and '60s and early '70s, but nonetheless centralized a good deal more. And then I also convened a panel to review the actions of all CIA officers who had been involved in Ames' career, who had been Ames' bosses, who had been running counterintelligence prior to the time it really begins to be done very well under Paul Redman. We determined there were four CIA officers who had made some very bad judgments. Not that they had done anything maliciously, but had made some very bad judgments about Ames, his career, promoting him, the way counterintelligence was run and the rest. Three of those were retired, and one was retiring within two days of the time our committee met. It shouldn't be surprising because Ames began his spying in '85, a number of the mistakes were made some years before. We were now in 1994. These were relatively senior people at the time, so they were retired. I was not going to fire this very distinguished officer who was left two days before his retirement, so we let him retire and the retired four people got strong letters saying you can't work for the CIA as a contractor and so on. But that's all one could do with retired people. There were some eight or nine officers still on active duty that had made some misjudgements here and there, certainly nothing that was a hanging offense. I wrote them different letters.

As a result of dealing with that issue that way, the press stories were uniformly: "Woolsey won't fire anyone over the Ames case." It was a constant theme of the press and of Senator DiConcini; to some extent some others on [Capitol] Hill, but mainly him. That was true for the reasons that I stated. I had one very distinguished senator, a good friend of mine still, who erupted in private with me and said, "Jim, just fire the first three people through the door!" [Laughter.] I said, "Suppose they are the three people who caught Ames?"

So that was what happened in the late fall, December of '94. Because I'd never had any kind of relationship with the White House that would let me really function very effectively, I thought, I decided to step down. And it was something that I think ought to be an object lesson to presidents and DCIs in the future, which is that you really need a DCI that you want to meet with because your ability in this job the three of us have held to manage a crisis like this and to do it in such a way that the Congress and the public says, "Ah, I see he or she is handling it reasonably," depends, at least to some substantial extent, on being able to work hand-in-glove with the president. That was not my lot.

PINCUS: Well, we've got a DCI who is working hand-in-glove with the president, and we've got criticism of the CIA that's probably more widespread right now than we had during the period when all three of you were there. If you could do it in about a minute and a half— make believe you're doing a sound bite— starting with Admiral Turner. The crises comes out of what are alleged to be failures in analysis and collection. What would you do?

TURNER: What would I do today?

PINCUS: What would you do today if you were [DCI] George Tenet?

TURNER: Resign! [Laughter.] I think the biggest problem of intelligence today is political direction from the White House. And I don't know what I would do if I were George Tenet, other than resign. Seriously, I really think that the pressures on George Tenet are very great. I don't have any way of appraising how well he's shielded his analysts from those pressures. But when the vice president of the United States goes out and talks to analysts 10 times, that's pressure.

PINCUS: Judge Webster?

WEBSTER: The CIA was created to achieve two end goals. One, to avoid another Pearl Harbor. We've done a pretty good job of that, unless you want to count 9/11 as an example of where we were not able to stop something. The other one was to have— President [Harry] Truman wanted an organization that did not have an agenda to collect and define the intelligence that was out there. Every department of government has an agenda, but the CIA was to have no agenda at all and, therefore, would have the best chance of giving it straight to the president on what the intelligence showed so that the policymakers could make wise decisions in the interests of the country and stay out of politics. Staying out of politics is easier said than done in organizations that call on CIA and other members of the community for their information.

I recall a less troubling situation than the one that Stan Turner referred to, when I had delivered one of our few public— annual public reports in which I stated that in our view, the breakup of the Warsaw Pact Convention and Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe was irreversible. I did not have the good sense to have made that at a time when the then-secretary of Defense, now the vice president [Richard Cheney] was going before Congress to ask for a new appropriation for the military. [Laughter.] And his first comment, which was, I think, spontaneous, when somebody asked about it, he said, "Well, that wasn't very helpful." But it was true. He quickly realized and he called me to tell me that he had instructed the components under his control at NSA [National Security Agency] and DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] and the other intelligence communities that he wanted them to continue to give the information just as straight as possible. And he disassociated himself from— it was unhelpful to him in his appropriation project, but he wanted to make it very clear— and I'm glad that he did— that this was not to be pressure to spin or modify. Every now and then, someone in the White House who had to deal with the political side of things, the public reaction, so on, would say something like "That was pretty strong," or "Did you have to say it that way?" But no one ever asked us to change. We used to say you can do what you want with it. You can use it and apply it. You can tear it up and throw it away in the wastebasket. But when we've given it to you, you can't change it. And we stuck to that as closely as we could. But there is that pressure out there, and you have to deal with it.

WOOLSEY: I don't see the current situation really the same way Stan does. You know, heck, in the Clinton administration, I'd have been delighted to have anybody from the White House come out one time— [laughter]--you know, the— Vice President [Al] Gore actually was very helpful to us. But I would have gotten out there on G.W. Parkway and directed traffic, whatever. [Laughter.]

I think that the main problem is not politicization. I think the [Bob] Woodward book [‘Plan of Attack”], on, at least, the weapons of mass destruction issue, puts that one pretty well to bed. It wasn't White House pressure that, it looks like, got George [Tenet] to say it's a slam dunk that there are weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq]. Now that's a complicated subject, and there may be weapons of mass destruction there, or in Syria. We can get to that in a later point in the program. But in any case, I don't see the politicization as a big issue. There are always going to be people in the political side who want something to come out a certain way. In the first two years of the Clinton administration, there were a number of people who desperately wanted us at the CIA to say that [President Jean Bertrand] Aristide was effectively going to be the Thomas Jefferson of Haiti. We somewhat grumpily declined to do that and pointed out both his short side as well as some of the positive things about him. We were not popular because of that. So what? I mean, I think you do what you do in these circumstances.

I think the main thing that we ought to talk about, and I think we will later, is this proposal for having an overall head of the intelligence community separate from the director of central intelligence. My view, briefly, is that that— I'm coming to be inclined to that view. I think that overall head should be called the director of central intelligence because, in principle, that's what the DCI is now; he just does not have the authority to go along with his responsibilities. He's sort of the chairman of the board of a conglomerate, and he owns no stock and has no executive authority in all except one of the subs. In that one, he's the CEO [of] the CIA. And so, all he can do in the others is kind of set the agenda and be a nice guy and say, "Can I help you out?" and "Could we have a meeting and talk about it?" when he's talking with the director of NSA and so on. The intelligence community has grown very rapidly since— in the last 50 years, since the passage of the National Security Act [of 1947]. We didn't even have U-2s [spy planes] in 1947, much less satellites. And NSA was a completely different type of entity at its birth than it is now. So I think we could use an overall chairman, but I think some of the proposals that have been made to that end have some weaknesses. And I think that it would free the director of the CIA, of the institution out at Langley, to spend more time and effort focusing on that job and have the overall DCI, I would call him, director of central intelligence, rather than DNI [director of national intelligence], coordinate the affairs of the community.

PINCUS: OK, now we'll open it up for questions. And if you would, when they get to you with a microphone, if you state your name and your affiliation.

QUESTIONER: Kevin Sheehan, Orix Venture Finance. There was an interesting article in The New York Times yesterday on the growth in the clandestine services. And the punch line seems to be, as we approach the third anniversary of 9/11, the clandestine services remain very small, and, in fact, are smaller than the FBI field office in New York. I'm wondering if the panel could comment on that: what are the limits to growth? Is it just a question of time, as the director has said, five years, whatever? Is it a question of money? Is it a question of institutional limitations, I mean, to the extent that you're looking for 35-year-old people with military backgrounds that can speak Arabic? Or do the clandestine services need to get substantially larger at all?

WOOLSEY: Well, I'll take a first shot at that. I think the human intelligence principal advantage is that it helps you understand and identify the intentions and capabilities of your adversary, something that our wonderful technology in the sky, in other words, cannot always do. In order to get that kind of information, the intelligence has to be pretty close to the source, has to be pretty close to the leadership of the particular people in the particular parts of the world. And often they have to grow up with it. You don't just take someone off the shelf and say go in and ask for a job with Saddam Hussein. It doesn't work that way. And that's where the five years is not an unrealistic view of what it takes. Language has been a problem since the end of World War II for the agency in getting— we used to use a lot of native-born officers who could speak the language and not be detected doing it. These people are not necessarily going to be spies themselves, but they have to be able to recruit people who are going to be credible and useful and supply timely information. It's a process that necessarily involves some time. Sometimes resources are withdrawn. Peace dividend. We don't need them anymore, that kind of problem. Then when there's trouble, of course, the first thing people turn to are human intelligence, even though we have many other sources of getting information. But that's where I think George Tenet identified the problem. I think the five years is realistic. We should get on with it and we should make sure that we don't fall that far behind again.

PINCUS: Jim?

WOOLSEY: If I could just add one point. I think you can see what one very skilled agent, or officer, can do with a group of agents. Again, you look at the Woodward book about the operation wonderfully called Rock Stars, with the CIA officer finally put into northern Iraq to run Iraqis and have enough money to— [inaudible.] It's a question principally, I think, of language and cultural skills and imagination— in some ways, more than numbers of people. The CIA has been quite successful over the years in some parts of the world, but we don't have out there yet nearly enough Arabic speakers and Farsi speakers and people like that officer who was out in northern Iraq. And that, in many ways I think, is probably the pacing item.

PINCUS: Right here in --

QUESTIONER: Marty Gross, Sandalwood Securities, for Mr. Woolsey. Could you elaborate on your comment that there may be weapons of mass destruction in Syria?

WOOLSEY: Yes, I think that the administration probably made a mistake using the word weapons, because weapons to most people accurately suggests bombs, shells, warheads, and a— if you have a stockpile of weapons you think of giant warehouses. And if you can't find a giant warehouse, it must not be there. If you talk about agent, bacteriological agent or chemical agent, the picture is a little clearer about what conceivably could have been smuggled out to Syria. [Lieutenant] General [James R.] Clapper [Jr.], the head of the National Geospatial [Intelligence] Agency, has said it looks like some material relating to WMD was moved out to Syria in the opening days of the war a year ago.

If you imagine a large truck stop with 25 tractor-trailers in it, a big truck stop, a lot of tractor-trailers, people getting coffee, getting diesel fuel and so forth, five of those tractor-trailers, 20- ton carrying capacity— 100 tons— would be the lower limit of the amount of chemical agent VX that Colin Powell estimated in his speech [before the United Nations Security Council] a year or so ago that the Iraqis had produced, and the 25 [tractor trailers] would be the 500 tons that was the upper limit. So the range in chemical agents in five tractor-trailers to 25 tractor-trailers. For bacteriological agent, we know Saddam made 8,500 liters of anthrax because he admitted to it in the '80s, when we finally caught him having a program in '95. That's a tractor-trailer— that's less— well under half a tractor-trailer, eight-and-a-half tons. And the outer edge of the anthrax, it was estimated, some 25 tons, is a tractor-trailer and a half. If you reduce that anthrax to powder, that's either four suitcases or 12 suitcases. So if you focus on what agent might have been produced and held to be able to be loaded into weapons at some future point, the practicality of something having been buried, taken to Syria, destroyed at the last minute and so forth is far more obvious than if you focus on fully loaded-up weapons.

I'd only make one last point. [Former chief U.S. weapons inspector David] Kay, in his report [to Congress], said that all of the Iraqi combat generals who were in custody, each one said, not speaking to the others, that although his unit didn't have chemical weapons, the unit to his right and the unit to his left did. So his combat generals may well have been deceived. And Kay himself said he thought there was some chance Saddam was deceived by his scientists telling him that they were doing more than they were in these areas. So before one is too hard on George Tenet and the Directorate of Operations for not spying out successfully what happened, one should at least consider the possibility that we could have had dozens of Iraqi generals and maybe even Saddam Hussein on our payroll as assets and informants, and we still might have been misled. It was a real twilight zone over there.

PINCUS: Over here, in the front.

QUESTIONER: Herbert Levin, former NIO [national intelligence officer]. Do you think that analysts and the country would be better served if the director did not participate in policymaking operations, reverted to stating his piece and then going outside the room to be called back when more information was needed? Quite clearly, some directors have become open advocates of policy, which certainly can affect how analysts operate and how their products are received elsewhere in the government.

WEBSTER: I have a point of view on that. I think it's somewhere in between. I agree with the principle that the director of central intelligence issues the intelligence analysis. I agree with the principle that he does not enter into the debate about what the policy should be. But I believe that it's wise for him to stick around to be sure someone is not misinterpreting or misstating the intelligence that he's given. But it ought to be clear for purposes of credibility that his mission is not to argue for policy. Over the years various DCIs have had a different view. [CIA Director] Bill Casey had a different view. Sometimes a president wants to know what you think. But it ought to be on the same basis as vice presidents supply information; when they're asked, they give their honest opinion, but they should stay out of urging a policy.

TURNER: I agree very strongly with Bill on that. You want to be part of the policy discussion so that you know when they need some more intelligence, you know what they need that you don't have but you want to now go out and get in order for them to make a sounder discussion. But you eschew participating in the policy discussion, although from time to time— I know it happened with me three or four times— the president turns to you and says, "Stan, what is your opinion on this?" And of course you give it to him if he wants it.

WOOLSEY: I think that's exactly right. And I think it would be bad to have to leave the room. One should be able to participate and continually raise the issues. But you have a limited role in the NSC [National Security Council] as the DCI, just as the chairman of the joint chiefs has a limited role. That's why both statutorily you're advisers to the NSC, not full members. You are there, I think, to provide intelligence, and you're there to provide advice about the realistic or non-realistic nature of suggestions for covert action, just as the chairman of the joint chiefs is there to provide recommendations one way or the other about military action. But normally the chairman of the joint chiefs and the DCI don't engage in the policy debate in the NSC in the same way that the secretary of state, secretary of defense or the president or vice president would.

PINCUS: Jim Hoge. He's an editor. I have to call on an editor.

QUESTIONER: Hi. Jim Hoge, from the Council. In this age of internationalized terrorism, I wonder what our panelists think about the idea that there ought to be a separate intelligence service to operate domestically in the United States, separate from the FBI, separate from the CIA.

WEBSTER: Well, if I can weigh in on this because I feel very strongly that would be a huge mistake. I say that for this reason. You're talking about creating an MI5 [British domestic counterintelligence service] out of a portion of the FBI's work in counterterrorism and counterintelligence. The model is about— works in a country that has a geography of 800 miles across. We have several thousand square miles to cover in any point where we would want to be able to get there before a bomb goes off, to detect something that's taking place. The FBI has given competent instruction in counterterrorism and counterintelligence, and terrorism is a crime, as well as a national security issue. If there's a problem in the training, why improve the training. I think they have excellent training in this area. And it means that you can cover the country both from a law enforcement perspective, investigative inspection, and also on the intelligence side.

The other problem with breaking it off, in addition to having one— yet one more organization to account through an integrated system. In all candor, my experience is that the British have a much more relaxed attitude about civil liberties and privacy interests than we do in this country. And they're much more tolerant of the kind of intrusive activities that an organization— a secret police, a state police, a national police— can engage in than we would tolerate for 10 minutes in this country. So I would say stick with what we have and improve it and don't wander into an MI5-type situation.

TURNER: Bill is certainly more qualified than any of us, having run both organizations, but I would disagree with him for two reasons. One is I think we have a real growth area here where we are going to have to integrate the policeman on the motorcycle in Montana with the domestic spying done by the FBI or an MI5, and it's going to be a very big operation and it's going to require, I think, a separate organization. And secondly, I just don't think you can change the culture of the FBI law enforcement agency that much. You've got to show them that this is now a new task— counterterrorism, counterintelligence— and it's under one organization.

PINCUS: Jim?

WOOLSEY: I'm somewhere in between my old friends here on this. [Laughter.] I've been in Bill's camp for some time, but I'm starting to lean a bit Stan-ward. [Laughter.] I think the arguments for retaining domestic intelligence collection within the bureau are substantial. The bureau already has established relations with state and local governments. They have done two major long-term intelligence collection operations domestically very well: against the Communist Party in the United States and against the Mafia. But, in the aftermath of some of the changes that have taken place over the years, it is— and they're focused very heavily on investigating individual cases— it is going to take a major cultural change, as Stan suggested, to get them into the business of domestic-intelligence collection against entities that may be related to terrorism as distinct from entities that are obviously and clearly engaged in a criminal enterprise. I will give you one example. I think any review of what has happened with the investigations [into the attacks of September 11] so far would suggest that there are probably a lot more Wahhabi-funded charities [Wahhabism is a strict form of Islam] and institutions in the United States that need to be dealt with in the same way we dealt with the Communist Party back during the Cold War: not outlawed, but put under very, very special scrutiny. I would not say the same, for example, of Sufi Muslim charities. We know of no particular problems with the Sufi charities. But Wahhabi is quite something else. I have not yet seen the kind of vigorous commitment to getting into the infrastructure of those institutions in this country that directly and indirectly, I think, are helping fund terrorism and terrorist-related organizations. I've seen some, but I'd like to see a good deal more. So, I'd very much like to see the director of the FBI operate in such a way as to retain the responsibility because I think it's probably better if it stays there. But so far, I haven't seen the kind of vigor that I would hope for.

WEBSTER: Let me say that I think [FBI] Director [Robert] Mueller is doing an outstanding job in moving in this direction, and in a quantum leap, from what we had before. Over 30 percent of the assets of the FBI are now directed at terrorism. So that movement is not a casual gesture. The culture that we hear about from time to time is a response to what the law requires or prohibited the FBI from doing over a long period of time, an outgrowth of the Church and Pike committee reports and restrictions that have been lifted largely through the Patriot Act and other more modern efforts to get people moving. This is not a new thing for the FBI. I made terrorism one of the three top priorities of the FBI in 1980. We were experiencing a hundred— average of a hundred terrorist incidents a year. Not a [World] Trade Center variety, but people were getting killed— hundreds of them. We decided to get there before the bomb went off, and we introduced intelligence into the operation. And when I went to the CIA in 1987, there were only five terrorist incidents that were committed that year in the United States. In the next year, there were none. It can be done. But we have to recognize our focus is on a certain kind of threat right now, but there are all kinds of threats over time that are lethal and threaten our national security. We have foreigners over here. We had— we got Algerians against Turks, Croatians against Serbs, Irish against Irish. There were all kinds of things that were not native-born but were run over here.

Now we have a globalized problem. Globalization and technology present our two greatest threats, big opportunities for good and opportunities for evil. And how do we get our handle on that? And I'll end up, because I may not get the floor again. The biggest problem in cooperation between the various services on this issue, in my view, was Congress's failure to support the FBI in giving it the kind of technology and equipment and mainframe computers in which they could respond, when the laws got changed, to the inquiries from CIA and other intelligence things. How many of you who run businesses would operate on a 13-year-old mainframe [computer]? That's what the FBI is doing today.

QUESTIONER: Brandon Sweitzer, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. A question about our reliance upon and the quality of intelligence supplied by other nations' intelligence services. If one reasonably presumes that these much smaller services depend almost entirely on human intelligence, do we over-rely on it? And how do we vet it? And what is its quality?

WEBSTER: We produce so much more intelligence than anybody else that our problem here is, when we get to exchanging with them, we have a ton of stuff to give, they have a couple of pounds to give. Their couple of pounds, though, is limited to their geographical zone, and it's terribly important against terrorism. So we have got to be willing to trade as much as we can— while protecting our sources of information— do. So I think it's a very important area, but don't expect much more from them than what concerns their immediate zone. The British and us are the only ones with real worldwide intelligence services in the world today.

PINCUS: Over here.

QUESTIONER: Thank you. Joanna Weschler, Human Rights Watch. Could you each share your reaction or comment on the report or allegation that CIA has been in part responsible for the treatment prisoners got in Iraq, the recent scandal?

PINCUS: Jim.

WOOLSEY: I'll start. The press reports I've seen said that the CIA has something on the order of a couple of dozen prisoners in the international system, including some of the most senior al Qaeda [leaders], like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the others. We didn't— my two years at the agency, we didn't have prisoners. We weren't in this business, and so I am not personally familiar, really, with the doctrines and methods of interrogation and the like. The part of this I find the most troubling is the notion that some prisoners may have been put in Abu Ghraib [prison] and moved around in order to keep them away from the scrutiny of the Red Cross, and that's just unacceptable. I think that the CIA's role in having— in themselves having custody of prisoners is likely to be an extremely limited one, even in the circumstances such as we have today. The fact that they have a number of people with language skills and the like might make them, under some circumstances, useful as people who supplied interrogators for the military when the military has custody. But I think that this is an important issue. It's important that the CIA do it right, and with respect to basic human rights. But numerically, the numbers are quite small and appear to be limited to these very, very senior al Qaeda, at least if the press reports are accurate.

PINCUS: There are three investigations going on that involve internees that died in relation to being interviewed by CIA people. Only one occurred while he was being interviewed. Two others are being investigated, and they're now in the Justice Department: one going back to last November in Afghanistan, and two in Iraq. Last question.

QUESTIONER: Thank you. Stapleton Roy, Kissinger Associates. Could panel members comment on the question of how the external intelligence function should relate to the Department of Homeland Security, and as a collateral part of that how the intelligence function should be handled within the Department of Homeland Security?

WEBSTER: I'll take that one on. I happen to be vice chairman of the Advisory Council on Homeland Security. And one of the initial threshold issues was how and how much and in what form do you get intelligence to the people in the country who would be likely to be the first on scene, the first responders, in the event of an explosion or catastrophic terrorist incident? It was my view, and has been my view, that we have exactly the right arrangement. I call it the triangle, the triangle being the Central Intelligence Agency and the intelligence community's collection of intelligence and the FBI's collection of counterterrorist information. This information is now integrated in something called TTIC, which is currently under the director of central intelligence— and I have a terrible time with acronyms, but it's Terrorist Threat Integration Center— to make sure that the dots get filled out and things are not missing. So when you collect the information, then how do you deliver it to one hundred, ten— or whatever it is— thousand first responder organizations out in the country? And I think the answer is relatively simple and straightforward. You provide finished intelligence. Finished intelligence is the kind of thing that provides the information necessary to identify a threat and perhaps what needs to be done about it, but does not give away the source of the information or the methods by which it was obtained.

Sources and methods need to be protected and it is not necessary to a person on the other end receiving the information. You can include a reference to the reliability of the information from a source believed to be reliable or of unknown reliability, and so on. But providing finished intelligence through the center at Homeland Security, where the state and local people feel comfortable in coming together to get that information, seems to me to be a very logical and workable arrangement that's under way at the present time.

TURNER: It bothers me that the director of central intelligence is in charge of the TTIC because you really want to keep foreign intelligence operatives away from the domestic scene. When you ask a CIA operative to get you some information, he or she says, how do I do it? Doesn't make any difference what the law says because we're talking about operating in a foreign country. You tell an FBI agent to get you some information, he or she says, how do I do it within the law? And you don't want to mix those two. So I think the secretary of homeland security ought to be in charge of this TTIC rather than the director of central intelligence.

WOOLSEY: I think Stan has a very good point. I would only add that if we implemented a reform along the lines of what [Representative] Jane Harman [D-Calif.] has suggested, and have a director of national intelligence— or as I said earlier, I'd prefer to call him the director of central intelligence, but have the CIA separately, under another individual— then that overall chairman of the board, in a sense, of the intelligence community who did not have operational control over the CIA I think could be a reasonable place for intelligence, including domestic intelligence, to come in through something like TTIC.

Let me add one other point. In this new world we're in, although intelligence is extremely important, and there are some things, obviously, we can do better and we should, we should not count on it in the same way, particularly to give us tactical warning, that we counted on intelligence during the Cold War. During the Cold War we thought we were spying on a giant empire and it had a lot of people who were willing to work for us because they were Soviets who, the way I put it— Thomas Jefferson did the recruiting for us. A lot of people spied for the United States because they were honorable people who wanted Russia to take a different direction towards democracy. And Ames got several of them killed. But we did pretty well on a lot of things in terms of getting spies inside the system of the Soviet Union and its allies, the Warsaw Pact. That's very hard in terrorist organizations because of the clan nature, because of the nature that you sometimes have to kill someone in order to be part of the group, et cetera, and also, the very limited number of people who know about something like 9/11. So your chance of finding out that there's going to be an attack using aircraft on Washington and New York on September 11th of a certain year is very, very limited. What you hope to get is some things that will help you prepare better, and if you're very lucky and you capture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and he tells you about something that's about to happen, you might get a warning of something like 9/11.

But you need to realize that a lot of what we need to do is improve the resilience of our own society in all sorts of ways so that even after attacks come, if they can be partially thwarted or made less effective, that those will have to, to some extent, be counted as victories as well.

PINCUS: Well, we're five minutes over. I think we ought to thank the panel and thank all of you. [Applause.]

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