Spy director led CIA reform
Stansfield Turner, a Rhodes scholar and Navy veteran who served under President Carter, was 94.
Stansfield A. Turner, who served as CIA director under President Carter and oversaw reforms at the agency after the Senate uncovered CIA surveillance aimed at U.S. citizens, has died. He was 94.
Turner died Thursday at his home in Seattle, his secretary, Pat Moynihan, confirmed to the Washington Post. Current CIA Director Mike Pompeo issued a statement late Thursday praising Turner for his service during a “turbulent period of history.”
A Rhodes scholar and 33year Navy veteran, Turner commanded NATO’s forces in southern Europe from 1975 to 1977 before being chosen to direct the Central Intelligence Agency.
Turner headed the agency from March 1977, shortly after Carter took office, through the end of Carter’s term in January 1981.
As in recent years, questions of how to structure and oversee the nation’s vast military and civilian intelligence operations were a pressing issue in the 1970s. The 1975 investigation of the CIA 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 U.S. citizens.
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.
Among the events occurring during Turner’s term were 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.
After leaving the CIA, Turner’s positions frequently put him at odds with Carter’s successor, President Reagan. In 1987, Turner told reporters that Reagan had to have known about the diversion of Iranian arms sales proceeds to Nicaraguan rebels at a time when Reagan said he had no knowledge of the plan.
In his 1985 book “Secrecy and Democracy,” Turner said the CIA under the Reagan presidency had violated the law in failing to notify Congress of covert operations “in a timely manner.”
“Our ethical standards in dealing with our Central American neighbors were revealed as not what we would like to believe them to be,” Turner wrote. “The world saw that we had endangered the lives and property of countries not involved with the dispute between us and Nicaragua, and that we were deliberately interfering in the affairs of Nicaragua to the point of undeclared war.”
When President George W. Bush revamped intelligence in 2005, naming a national intelligence director with oversight over all operations, Turner argued for a more radical overhaul that would combine all intelligence-gathering under one roof, separate from the analytical function. Constant “tweaking” of the spy agencies’ functions and structure by successive administrations “has not left us today with a coherent intelligence structure,” he said then.
In the post-Cold War years, Turner also was a strong advocate for nuclear disarmament. In his 1997 book “Caging the Nuclear Genie — An American Challenge for Global Security,” Turner propounded the concept of “strategic escrow” — effectively mothballing hundreds of nuclear missiles by storing them hundreds of miles from any launch site and allowing Russian observers track of them.
The hope was that with that gesture, the Russians would reciprocate and mothball a number of their own warheads.
Turner maintained that even if the Russians didn’t reduce their arsenal, the United States would still have enough nuclear weapons to retaliate if needed.
Turner was born in Highland Park, Ill., in 1923.
He was in the same 1947 naval class at Annapolis, Md., as Carter, but the men didn’t know each other. Turner finished 25th in the class of 820 cadets, while the Carter finished 59th.
After serving in the Korean and Vietnam wars, Turner was appointed president of the Naval War College in 1972. He was promoted to admiral and became commander of NATO’s southern European forces in 1975.
In 2005 when the submarine USS Jimmy Carter entered the Navy’s fleet, Turner praised his former boss as “an effective president while also showing the world what the United States stands for in values, in integrity, in morality, in unselfish compassion for others, in the pursuit of peace.”
In a statement tweeted by the Carter Center, the former president said, “When I was elected, I had no doubt who I thought should lead our entire intelligence community, and Stan did an extraordinary job. I always will be grateful for his reforms and for the outstanding intelligence he provided me.”
Turner’s first marriage to Patricia Busby Whitney ended in divorce in 1984. They had two children, Laurel and Geoffrey. Turner married Eli Karin Gilbert in 1985. She and three others were killed in 2000 in a Costa Rica plane crash in which Turner was seriously injured. In 2002, he married Marion Levitt Weiss.