23 Facts About Stansfield Turner

Stansfield Turner was an admiral in the United States Navy who served as President of the Naval War College, commander of the United States Second Fleet, Supreme Allied Commander NATO Southern Europe, and was Director of Central Intelligence under the Carter administration.

Stansfield Turner was appointed to lead the CIA by Jimmy Carter in 1977 and undertook a series of controversial reforms, including downsizing the Agency's clandestine arm and emphasizing technical intelligence collection over human intelligence.

Stansfield Turner was a senior research scholar at the University of Maryland, College Park's School of Public Policy.

Stansfield Turner graduated from Highland Park High School in 1941 before attending Amherst College until 1943.

Stansfield Turner then served as commanding officer of the destroyer USS Rowan and the guided missile cruiser USS Horne, where he participated in combat operations off the coast of Vietnam.

Stansfield Turner then served as Director, Systems Analysis Division, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations ; President of the Naval War College ; and Commander, United States Second Fleet, Naval Station Norfolk.

Stansfield Turner retired from active Navy duty on December 31,1978.

Stansfield Turner sought to revamp the Agency in several ways, first appointing several high-ranking naval officers, known as the "Navy mafia", to leadership positions and by fundamentally altering the Agency's traditional methods of intelligence collection.

In 1979, Stansfield Turner eliminated over 800 operational positions, most of them in the clandestine service, in what was dubbed the Halloween Massacre.

Stansfield Turner oversaw the beginning of Operation Cyclone, the CIA's program to arm Afghan guerrillas in their fight against the Soviet Union.

Stansfield Turner accused Snepp of breaking the secrecy agreement required of all CIA employees, and then later was forced to admit under cross-examination that he had never read the agreement signed by Snepp.

Ironically, the CIA would later rely on the Snepp legal precedent to force Stansfield Turner to seek preclearance of his own memoirs, which were highly critical of President Ronald Reagan's policies.

On March 12,1980, President Jimmy Carter and Stansfield Turner presented Tony Mendez with the CIA's Intelligence Star for his role in the exfiltration of six US State Department personnel from Iran on January 28,1980.

Stansfield Turner served as a member of the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography's Marine Advisory Council and the United States Naval Academy's Board of Visitors.

Stansfield Turner was sharply critical of the Bush administration's handling of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Stansfield Turner served on the Military Advisors Committee for the Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, whose mission was to reduce the amount of the discretionary budget going to the military by 15 percent and reallocate that money to education, healthcare, renewable energies, job training, and humanitarian aid programs.

Stansfield Turner married Patricia Busby Whitney on December 23,1953.

Stansfield Turner then married Norwegian-born Eli Karin Gilbert in 1985.

On January 15,2000, Stansfield Turner survived a plane crash, although seriously injured, in Costa Rica that killed his wife and three other people on board.

Stansfield Turner died at his home in Redmond, Washington on January 18,2018, at age 94.

Stansfield Turner was an Honorary fellow of his University of Oxford alma mater, Exeter College, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

Stansfield Turner was inducted as a Laureate of The Lincoln Academy of Illinois and awarded the Order of Lincoln by the Governor George Ryan in 1999 in the area of Government.

Stansfield Turner received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1978.