New York Times 18 May 1997 Spy & Counterspy By GEORGE F. KENNAN It is my conviction, based on some 70 years of experience, first as a Government official and then in the past 45 years as a historian, that the need by our government for secret intelligence about affairs elsewhere in the world has been vastly overrated. I would say that something upward of 95 percent of what we need to know could be very well obtained by the careful and competent study of perfectly legitimate sources of information open and available to us in the rich library and archival holdings of this country. Much of the remainder, if it could not be found here (and there is very little of it that could not), could easily be nonsecretively elicited from similar sources abroad. In Russia, in Stalin's time and partly thereafter, the almost psychotic preoccupation of the Communist regime with secrecy appeared to many, not unnaturally, to place a special premium on efforts to penetrate that curtain by secretive methods of our own. This led, of course, to the creation here of a vast bureaucracy dedicated to this particular purpose; and this latter, after the fashion of all great bureaucratic structures, has endured to this day long after most of the reasons for it have disappeared. Even in the Soviet time, much of it was superfluous. A lot of what we went to such elaborate and dangerous means to obtain secretly would have been here for the having, given the requisite quiet and scholarly analysis of what already lay before us. The attempt to elicit information by secret means has another very serious negative effect that is seldom noted. The development of clandestine sources in another country involves, of course, the placing and the exploitation of secret agents in that country. This naturally incites the mounting of a substantial effort of counterintelligence on the part of the respective country's government. This, in turn, causes us to respond with an equally vigorous effort of counterintelligence in order to maintain the integrity of our espionage effort. This competition in counterintelligence efforts tends to grow into dimensions that wholly overshadow the original effort of positive [148 lines left ... full text available at <url:http://www.reference.com/cgi-bin/pn/go?choice=message&table=05_1997&mid=3317883&hilit=CIA> ] -------------------------------- Article-ID: 05_1997&3301388 Score: 82 Subject: Gary Webb responds