that largely to him, except to say that the United States intelligence agencies don't operate in a vacuum. They're part of a representative democracy. They function under the United States Constitution, and they have to work within a democratic system of checks and balances.

Concluding, let me just say that we need-I believe we need a statutory foundation for the United States Intelligence Community. This extraordinary set of disparate laws and executive orders that we've produced over 55 years, none of them, I don't believe, give a comprehensive legal foundation for a massive intelligence establishment, and that is a remarkable state of affairs in a country that prides itself on taking the rule of law seriously. Now, this is exceedingly difficult to do. You're looking at a man here who tried it on three separate occasions and didn't get anywhere, so I know how difficult it is, but at least to me it still makes sense.

We need to increase public understanding of the Intelligence Community. I am now working in an environment with a lot of academics, and I am just amazed at the cynicism about the Intelligence Community that I find in the academic community. These are the people that are teaching our sons and daughters and grandchildren. It's not in our interest to let this cynicism grow. It's a tough problem. These are secret agencies. But they operate in a democratic society, and as much information as possible has to be made public about the process. And if we don't begin to educate the American people more on the Intelligence Community, the importance of the intelligence, the difficulties they confront, the obstacles they have, we're going to pay for that down the road.

And let me put a word in about politics. I'm the only politician at this table, so I have some freedom to make a comment on it, I think-a few politicians in front of me, of course.

I think we have to be careful to ensure that intelligence is not mixed with politics. Policymakers should not use intelligence as a tool to make policy look good. They should use intelligence as a tool of good policy. It's a very hard distinction to make, but it's a terribly important one. Because this community relies so much on secrecy, intelligence fits awkwardly into an open society, but it is essential to our national security. Secrets must be kept. The burden is on you, the burden is on the President, to ensure to the maximum extent possible that our Intelligence Community is held to standards of accountability and transparency as much as possible in a representative democracy.

Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman GRAHAM. Mr. Congressman, thank you very much. Judge Webster.

TESTIMONY OF THE HON. WILLIAM WEBSTER, CHAIRMAN, WEBSTER COMMISSION

Judge WEBSTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It's an honor for me to be here, and that you may be interested in some of my views. The shortness of time when I was invited to come and my travel schedule precluded me from preparing a formal statement, but if you would give me just a few minutes, I might make some informal comments and then be able to respond to whatever you might want

to say.

Chairman GRAHAM. Thank you, Judge.

Judge WEBSTER. Much of what Congressman Hamilton said I find myself in total agreement with, and I will try not to repeat that. The genius of our Constitution, of our founding fathers, is in checks and balances, and over time we've been called upon to address special needs, special circumstances, but be true to our principles, including the rule of law.

In my time, when I first came here in 1978, 24 years ago, the first thing that Vice President Mondale did was to hand me a copy of the Church and Pike Committee reports with a suggestion that I read them, which I did. At that time, the pendulum had swung over in the interest of "leave us alone." Today, we have a different set of circumstances in which people are saying do something about it, and your task, along with that of the President and the judiciary-of course, I don't need to preach to the choir-is to strike that balance true, to deal with these threats as they occur, to be relevant to the particular kinds of sets we're doing, but to preserve our values and our institutions by means for which we will not have to change and upset the apple cart. I used to say, let's try to keep this pendulum as close to the center as we can, because then we'll always have to go back and change when the mood of the country changes.

General Vernon Walters, who had a distinguished career, was Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, and our representative to the United Nations, and ambassador to Germany, and trusted colleague of General Eisenhower, used to say that the American people had an ambivalent approach to intelligence. When they felt threatened, they wanted a whole lot of it, and when they didn't feel threatened, it was maybe a little immoral.

And I used to couple that with some comments about security from my perspective at the FBI. I said, "Security in this country always seems to be too much, until the day it's not enough." And this is the challenge that these great agencies which report to you for oversight have to deal with--having enough security, but not too much, and having enough intelligence, but not intruding on the rights and privacy interests of our citizens. And that's a big challenge.

And I think nowhere in my memory, in over all those years of thinking back to how we dealt with it, has there been so much impact on a problem as the issue of terrorism as it now exists in our country. In 1980, I made terrorism one of the four top priorities of the FBI. Previously there had been foreign counterintelligence, white-collar crime and organized crime. We were experiencing about 100 terrorist incidents a year, not of the size and scope of 9/11, of course, but they were killing people, they were threatening people, and they were putting people in fear.

We determined to improve our intelligence capability in order to get there before the bomb went off. And as I look back on it, I think we did a pretty good job for the nature of the challenge as it existed at that time. There were less than a handful of terrorist incidents in the year I moved from FBI to CIA in 1987. And the following year I believe there were no terrorist incidents.

There were no truly international terrorist events taking place on our shores. And that is where I think there is a significant dif

ference that intelligence and law enforcement have to address. We had certainly the largest terrorist events when I started were from Armenians attacking Turks in this country and from Serbs and Croatians warring with each other and Irish Republicans and so forth.

We addressed those and they disappeared from our scene. But they were not truly international terrorists as we now define them. They were people who had ties with the homelands from which they'd come or from which their parents had come. They were fighting old wars. But they were not getting their instructions and their marching orders from overseas.

This is a new experience for us, although, as I believe that Senator Shelby pointed out, the 1993 Trade Center was a wakeup call to do something about it. But it calls for new sets of relationships between CIA, which has been functioning largely abroad, until more recently, with the FBI's participation and expanded legal attache relationships, and the law enforcement responsibilities of dealing with the threat here; and now, of course, the whole concept of a new Department of Homeland Security, which will have to be dealt with in a way that advances and utilizes and magnifies the capabilities of intelligence that we have.

What I'd like to suggest-first of all, I do want to comment on the fact that President Truman, in selecting and asking for a Central Intelligence Agency, did want an agency that did not have an agenda, did not have a Defense perspective, did not have a State Department perspective, but would try to call it as they saw it to be, to provide useful and timely intelligence so that the policymakers, not the CIA, could make wise decisions in the interest of our country.

Now we're confronting what to do about terrorism. The one thought I'd like to lay on the table, and yield to the next participant and answer questions down the road, is this: More than any other kind of threat that I can recall-and I went through the Cold War and the Gulf War and the invasion of Panama and a whole host of challenges during the time I was here-more than any other kind of threat, there is an interrelationship between law enforcement and intelligence in dealing with the problem of terrorism.

At the time I started out, Interpol, the one great international organization for effective law enforcement and cooperation on an international basis, refused to authorize assistance on matters relating to terrorism because it was deemed to be an Article III type offense, which is, "We don't deal with political matters."

We worked very hard. I went to Milan. I went to Luxembourg. We dealt with the United Nations, with Interpol, and finally were able to persuade them that when you take on and injure and kill innocent victims away from the scene of the controversy, under circumstances that would be criminal in almost any other context, this was criminal, and therefore Interpol ought to cooperate and the United Nations ought to cooperate. And we moved that ball way down the road.

But I think it's important to understand it is not just criminal. It is also a matter of very good intelligence. And so it isn't enough, in my mind, to say we need more analysts to deal with the prob

lem. In looking at these situations, we need both investigative capability and intelligence collection capability, as well as those who go through the bits and pieces and fill in the dots.

And I hope that this committee will not come up with a recommendation that tilts in one direction or the other. And you can probably anticipate I do have some views on the fact that the CIA and the FBI are now somewhat liberated from the rules that said stay away from each other that came out of the days of the Church and Pike Committee report, and that they now have a responsibility to work together and share together and not feel they're doing something that's illegal or prohibited, but also to recognize that while we talk about intelligence, investigation develops intelligence and they have to work together.

Both are important to dealing with the problem we now confront. And I hope also that in the rush to judgment, we will remember who we are and that the methods we choose, both for intelligence and for law enforcement, will be consistent with who we are in this country.

Thank you very much.

Chairman GRAHAM. Thank you, Judge Webster. General Odom. [The prepared statement of General Odom follows:]

TESTIMONY BEFORE THE JOINT INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE

By William E. Odom

3 October 2002

Good morning, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee. It is an honor to appear here today.

You have asked me to share my views on the role and responsibility of the Director of Central Intelligence, the Secretary of Defense, and the FBI in dealing with terrorism. This is a very large set of topics. I have submitted a copy of an intelligence reform study, which I chaired and drafted a few years ago, as a comprehensive answer to your questions. The analysis and recommendations it puts forward, in my judgment, are all the more compelling in light of the events of 11 September 2001. I hope that this study, or parts of it, can be used as my written testimony. To be sure, I am also submitting a short additional written statement prepared especially for today to adjust the emphasis in the study to your specific interests in this hearing.

Those interests seem to be directed toward the structure of the Intelligence Community. If I am correct about that assumption, then I am encouraged. While it is important to know the details of how the intelligence failure of 11 September occurred and to assign some responsibility for it, it is far more important to take the opportunity to fix longstanding structural problems within the Intelligence Community. I certainly can offer nothing on the events leading up to 11 September of last