Posted on 01/18/2018 6:09:39 PM PST by Borges
Retired Navy Adm. Stansfield Turner, the iconoclastic director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the late 1970s who significantly reorganized its clandestine ranks and helped usher in a new technological age at the agency, died Jan. 18 at his home in Seattle. He was 94.
His secretary, Pat Moynihan, confirmed the death but did not disclose the cause.
An Oxford-educated Rhodes scholar, Adm. Turner was long considered to be one of the Navy’s sharpest analytical minds and brashly confident leaders. He was a four-star admiral and commander of NATO forces in Southern Europe when he was tapped in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter, a Naval Academy classmate, to lead the U.S. intelligence community.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Was he a good one?
Wapo really loved the guy.
yeah, great guy, devastated the CIA’s clandestine services in an over-reaction to scandals.... thought intel work could be done almost entirely without human sources....
Yikes, what did he do to piss off the Clinton’s?
He was an admitted pacifist who brought in almost all deep cover agents from the field on the theory that we could learn everything we needed with satellites and listening devices. He was a disaster.
Useless as teats on a bull.
Part of Jimmy Carter’s wrecking crew, IIRC.
bump
I met Admiral Turner once when I was a midshipman (1975). Personable, but a Democrat Perfumed Prince who later hosed up the CIA, opposed Republican administrations, and advocated for steep cuts in defense spending. RIP.
See post #4. It is absolutely correct. Turner is blamed for the miserable intel performance, especially HUMINT, that led to the ouster of the Shah of Iran and his replacement by the Ayatollah Khomeini (of whom the CIA knew little and the US Embassy in France was generally ignorant).
what is the significance of the French embassy in this comment? Just curious
Khomeini was in exile in France.
Thanx. I’m old enough to know that and old enough to not remember.
was he shacked up with Arafat’s wife? Just asking.
p
.....opposed Republican administrations, and advocated for steep cuts in defense spending.
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Yes, he was especially critical of R Reagan. I think he was one of those who had “Gorbasms”, as Rush used to call them..
From the link in the previous post: “A comparable de-emphasis on Communist matters took place in the CIA. In 1977 President Jimmy Carter appointed Admiral Stansfield Turner as the new Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). He soon dismissed several hundred of the Agency’s experts on Communism. Turner, in his memoirs, justified the reduction in staff by pointing to a previous study, conducted in mid-1976 under DCI, later President, George H. W. Bush, which recommended the abolition of 1,350 positions in the Agency’s espionage branch. Turner claimed that, of the final total of 820 positions vacated largely by attrition, only 17 people were actually dismissed, while 147 took an early forced retirement.10 But the CIA has never fully recovered from the Turner-era reductions in this critical area.”
I recently read a book called “the billion dollar spy” about cold war espionage with Russia. Not much good to say about Turner. Great book
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