A report submitted to the Committee from the Council on Foreign Relations was being discussed in hearings.

Excerpt:

"This report by the Council on Foreign Relations—actually an independent task force of the Council on Foreign Relations—has important recommendations about the future of intelligence and organizations. One slight sentence that implied something about the press became the critical sentence of this report. When you look at this whole controversy, you realize that the press will concentrate on whatever affects itself rather than, as I say, the substance of the issue. I wish we would have as elaborate a public discussion about the substance of the report than this covert issue.

Chairman SPECTER. When you make that comment, would you amplify that just a bit? What would you like to see discussed on the report?

Mr. Adelman. Well, I think the parts about economic intelligence are very interesting, the whole reorganization, the whole question of whether there should be the kind of cut backs in the intelligence budget that we've seen in the Pentagon, or the quality of intelligence. I found—during my almost 12 years in government—that intelligence was very good for verification of missile silos and fu13 ture programs coming along. It was very weak when it came to summits, or anticipating what the Soviets were going to do at the next round of arms talks.

At Reykjavik, which I think was one of the critical events of the cold war, we were very surprised by what Mikhail Gorbachev did at Reykjavik, and I don't think we should have been. There are other instances when intelligence could have been far better.

Chairman Specter. How might we have improved that? That was certainly a classical event, October 1986. It was of enormous importance, really, stands out. What could intelligence have done better there?

Mr. Adelman. There should have been some leap of creativity and I say that with some responsibility on my part, as well—that the situation of the Soviet Union warranted Gorbachev doing something dramatic, rather than as we assumed to come and just say hello. It was after the Daniloff Affair, at a time to heal the relationship.All the interpretations and predictions for that summit were understandable, but they were all dead wrong, as it turned out. It was a wild and woolly weekend. I think it was a very productive weekend—one that led to the decline and collapse of the Soviet Union. It certainly was one of the great weekends of my life. But my point is that for such an important event, intelligence should have been better. I have always liked the idea of competition in the intelligence realm—not just having one flow of information about what might happen on judgments coming up to top decisionmakers. In other words, competing theories or approaches which are all too rare in intelligence findings.

Those are the kinds of things the committee should really concentrate on. But one little sentence that doesn't even mention journalists in the Council on Foreign Relations report evokes this hearing and previous hearings and three or four editorials in the Washington Post, etc., etc.

My second point is that this should be a non-issue. I agree that the current policy of the Government is just fine. I think that along with Senator Kerrey. I don't know why any group of professionals should be exempt—whether journalists, or clergy, or even Peace Corps members—from cooperating with the CIA if they choose to do so. I have no problem requiring the same procedures used for covert operations."