Stansfield A. Turner, CIA director under President Jimmy Carter, at age 94
SEATTLE — Stansfield A. Turner, who served as CIA director under President Jimmy Carter and oversaw reforms at the agency after the Senate uncovered CIA surveillance aimed at American citizens, has died. He was 94.
Mr. Turner’s secretary, Pat Moynihan, confirmed to the Washington Post that Mr. Turner died Thursday at his home in Seattle but Moynihan did not disclose the cause.
A Rhodes scholar and 33-year Navy veteran, Mr. Turner commanded NATO’s forces in southern Europe from 1975 to 1977 before being chosen to direct the Central Intelligence Agency.
Mr. Turner headed the agency from March 1977, shortly after Carter took office, through the end of Carter’s term in January 1981.
Mr. Turner promised at his Senate confirmation hearing to conduct intelligence operations “strictly in accordance with the law and American values.” He also said “covert operations must be handled very discreetly. People’s lives are at stake.”
A day later, the Senate unanimously confirmed his appointment.
As in recent years, questions of how to structure and oversee the nation’s vast military and civilian intelligence operations were a big issue in the 1970s.
The investigation of the CIA in 1975 and ‘76 by the Senate committee headed by Sen. Frank Church had exposed CIA assassination plots, including the hiring of Mafia hit men in a failed bid to kill Fidel Castro, as well as CIA surveillance aimed at American citizens.
When Mr. Turner was chosen as CIA director in early 1977, New York Times columnist Tom Wicker wrote that “he’s got a bear by the tail, one that even the most bold and determined director probably can’t control.”
Current CIA Director Mike Pompeo praised Mr. Turner in a statement Thursday night.
“Admiral Turner was a devoted patriot and public servant who led our Agency through a turbulent period of history, including both the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian revolution,” Pompeo said. “An analyst at heart, Admiral Turner championed analytic innovation and applied his extensive military knowledge and insight to the challenges of the day.”
Mr. Turner was the first director given full authority over the agency’s $7 billion budget. Assassinations and medical experiments on unwitting human subjects were prohibited. But he argued that some proposals aimed at sharing agency information with Congress went too far, because some operations were too sensitive and the possibility of damaging leaks too great.
Among the events occurring during Mr. Turner’s term was the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-81 and the disastrous U.S. attempt to rescue the hostages in April 1980 that left eight U.S. servicemen dead.
Turner’s first marriage to Patricia Busby Whitney ended in divorce in 1984. They had two children, Laurel and Geoffrey. Mr. Turner married Eli Karin Gilbert in 1985. She and three other passengers were killed in 2000 in a Costa Rica plane crash in which Mr. Turner was seriously injured. In 2002, he married Marion Levitt Weiss.