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Authors: Mark M. Lowenthal

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What was often missing in this wealth of detailed data were the intangibles: the solidity of the Soviet state, the depth of support for it in the general population, and the degree of restiveness among the satellite populations. Few analysts questioned the stability or viability of the Soviet Union in the near term. Discussions about the possible collapse of the Soviet Union tended to be mostly hypothetical in nature as opposed to a potential policy problem. Moreover, despite the goal of containment being a situation where the Soviet Union would be forced to abandon foreign adventure in order to address large internal problems or face the prospect of collapse, many analysts viewed the actual possibility of a Soviet collapse with alarm. After all, there were tens of thousands of nuclear weapons deployed across the fifteen Soviet republics. Successor regimes might not maintain control over them or the Soviet Union might devolve into civil war among nuclear armed foes. This clearly was a concern of President George H. W. Bush in 1991, as the Soviet Union fell apart. Bush gave a speech in Kiev, Ukraine, urging the Ukrainians—and. by implication, the other Soviet republics—not to rush headlong to dissolve the Soviet Union. Bush’s critics, who saw this as a retreat of United States’ support for freedom, caustically labeled this the “Chicken Kiev speech.”
THE “COMFORT” OF A BILATERAL RELATIONSHIP
 
In addition to the comfort drawn from the relative predictability of watching highly routinized Soviet military activities, there was another comfort drawn from the competitive bilateral relationship. There was a belief, probably in both capitals, that policy makers could influence one another’s actions. “If we do X, they will do A or B. We’d prefer B but they may do A.” This belief, which was borne out fairly often in diplomacy and military activities, gave the relationship a certain rhythm and assurance and thus a certain assumed level of predictability. It was exactly this sense of comfort that began to bother more hawkish U.S. national security experts in the late 1970s, who felt that U.S. policies failed to be confrontational enough. They felt that the edge had gone out of containment, that the main goal now was to accept the Soviet Union and its advances and find ways to accommodate it. Ronald Reagan, when running for president in 1976 and 1980, made it clear that he would reverse this policy of accommodation. This sense of comfort implied a certain level of unstated agreement on the boundaries of actions. There was an assumed sense of shared rationality, even if it did not extend to such philosophical issues as MAD.
This is akin to the “rational actor” model in social science, which requires a certain level of shared assumptions, values, and boundaries. This behavior may occasionally occur but it is not an entirely useful premise for intelligence analysis on an ongoing basis. There will be times when a policy maker makes a decision that seems entirely rational and beneficial but still oversteps when seen by others. In other words, individuals miscalculate. The Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan in December 1979 is a good example. In Moscow, the invasion seemed a logical next step after years of military advice and increased military presence in support of friendly regime just over the Soviet border. In other words, the Soviets could feel confident that they were acting within their acknowledged sphere of influence. The high level of protest encountered worldwide must have come as a shock to the Soviet leadership. President Jimmy Carter’s (1977-1981) reaction, however, also betrayed the sense of cold war comfort he had enjoyed. Having said at the outset of his administration that he did not want the Soviet Union to be the sole focus of his foreign policy, he now admitted that he had never understood the Soviet Union until then.
COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION
 
Much of the controversy surrounding the U.S. intelligence record on the Soviet Union stems from the sudden Soviet collapse. Critics of intelligence performance argue that the demise deeply surprised the intelligence community, which had overestimated the strength of the Soviet state and thus missed the biggest story in the community’s history. Some people even contended that this intelligence failure was sufficient reason for a profound reorganization of U.S. intelligence. Defenders of intelligence performance argued that the community had long reported the inner rot of the Soviet system and its weak hold on its own people and the satellite states.
The defenders of U.S. intelligence performance are, in part, correct. Intelligence provided numerous stories about the gross inefficiencies of the Soviet system, many of them anecdotal but too many to ignore. Insights into the sad realities of the Soviet system grew with the beginning of on-site inspections of Soviet intermediate nuclear forces (INF) bases in 1988. But few, if any, analysts compiled the anecdotal accounts into a prediction that the Soviet state was nearing collapse. It was weak; it might even be tottering. But no one expected that the Soviet Union would suddenly—and, most important, peacefully—pass from the scene. At least two factors were at work. First, most U.S. analysts working on the Soviet Union could not bring themselves to admit that the center of their livelihood might disappear, or that it was as weak politically as it turned out to be. Such a conclusion was inconceivable. They concentrated on the perils and pitfalls of reform but did not consider the possibility of collapse. Also, given the past brutality of Soviet (and Russian) governments, the idea of a peaceful collapse seemed impossible, leading to violent scenarios too horrific to contemplate. Second, analysts failed to factor into their calculations the role of personalities, particularly that of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party (the most powerful position) in 1985.
The difficulty in assessing Gorbachev should not be underestimated. He came to power through the usual Politburo selection process. Like each new Soviet leader before him, Gorbachev was an orthodox Soviet communist, promising reforms to make the admittedly inefficient state work more effectively. Eduard A. Shevardnadze, Gorbachev’s foreign minister, reveals that at a certain point they both admitted that fixing the economy would require something more basic than tweaking reforms. Even while accepting this fact, Gorbachev remained committed to the basic forms of the Soviet state, not understanding that any true reform was, by definition, revolutionary. Only over time did Gorbachev come to these conclusions, and he could not accept their ultimate implications. In other words, he did not know where his reforms would lead. Should the intelligence community have known better than Gorbachev himself?
Many intelligence analysts were also slow to pick up on Gorbachev’s approach to most of his foreign policy problems—arms control, Angola, even Afghanistan—which was to liquidate them as quickly as possible to be free to concentrate on more pressing domestic problems. Nor did many correctly analyze that the Soviet Union would acquiesce in the collapse of its European satellite empire. The satellite empire dissolved peacefully in 1989, as a few satellite leaders made efforts to liberalize, which led to the dissolution of the old order in all of the satellites. Czechoslovakia, maybe. But East Germany? Never. Again, the degree to which this was knowable remains uncertain. Ironically, Gorbachev succumbed to the premises of
containment
as described by George Kennan forty years earlier. Stymied abroad, Gorbachev had to face the manifold problems he had at home.
The factors that went into Gorbachev’s thinking or into the sudden Soviet collapse remain unknown. Did the U.S. defense buildup under President Ronald Reagan convince Gorbachev that he needed to strike some deals with the United States or be outpaced and outspent and face even deeper economic ruin? Shevardnadze suggests that the answer is yes. Some believe that President Ronald Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was an important spur to arms control, not because of any near-term change that SDI might effect in the military balance but because it brought home to Soviet leaders their country’s weaknesses in technology, in computers, and in wealth. One of the ways to avoid economic ruin was to strike arms control deals. (SDI was the catch-phrase for the effort promoted by President Reagan to find ways to defend against nuclear attacks. Reagan believed that such a defensive capacity, which he said the United States would share, would make all nuclear weapons obsolete.)
Whether the so-called
Reagan Doctrine—a
U.S. effort to aid anti-Soviet guerrillas—had any effect on Soviet thinking also remains unknown. The effort to aid the contras in Nicaragua became a political liability for the Reagan administration. But aid to the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan and the stalemate of that war shook the Soviet leaders. They were unable to win a war just over their border. Soviet military prowess was meaningless. Some analysts believe that a rift developed between the General Staff in Moscow and the “Afgantsy”—Soviet field commanders in the war, many of whom rallied to Boris N. Yeltsin in August 1991, when opponents of radical reform attempted to overthrow Gorbachev.
Gorbachev clearly thought that the price of empire was too high, overseas and even in Eastern Europe. What neither Western analysts nor Gorbachev himself understood was that piecemeal liquidation of these problems could not save the Soviet state.
INTELLIGENCE AND THE SOVIET PROBLEM
 
No U.S. intelligence estimate boldly predicted the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union and its dissolution into several independent republics. U.S. intelligence assumed that the Soviet state would go on, perhaps ever weaker but still intact. At the same time, the community produced numerous reports about how inefficient, weak, and unsustainable (over some unknown period of time) the Soviet Union was.
Two key questions need to be answered: Should intelligence have done better? Did intelligence matter for the United States in its final cold war victory?
Those who argue that intelligence should have done better do so on the grounds that the Soviet Union was the central focus of U.S. intelligence and that all of the expertise and spending over five decades should have provided greater insight into the true state of affairs. But a large gap exists between knowing that a state has fundamental weaknesses and fore-seeing its collapse. To a large extent, the collapse of the Soviet Union was unprecedented. (In the past, some once-great empires, such as the Ottoman Empire, had suffered long, lingering demises. Other great empires had suffered sudden collapses, but usually in the context of war, as did the German, Austrian, and Russian empires after World War I.) Nor was there anything in Soviet behavior—which had shown its brutal side often enough—to lead analysts to expect that the nation’s elite would acquiesce to its own fall from power without a struggle. An irony of history is that an attempt by the so-called power ministries of the Soviet state (the military, the defense industrial complex, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (KGB)—the State Security Committee—to derail Gorbachev revealed how little support the Soviet system had. (Rumors persist that Gorbachev knew about the coup or abetted it as a means of isolating his opposition.)
The debate about the performance of U.S. intelligence in the final stages of the cold war continues. Perhaps some analyst should have made the leap from the mountain of anecdotal evidence to a better picture of the true state of Soviet staying power. But much that happened from 1989 to 1991 was unknowable, both to U.S. analysts and to those taking part in the events.
How can the role of intelligence be assessed overall on the Soviet problem? In collection, U.S. intelligence performed some remarkable feats, finding sophisticated technical solutions to the problems posed by the remote and closed Soviet target. In analysis, U.S. intelligence accurately tracked Soviet military numbers and capabilities. This was important not only on a day-to-day basis but also during periods of intense confrontation, such as in Cuba in 1962, when President John F. Kennedy acted confidently because he knew a great deal about the true state of the U.S.-Soviet military balance. Discussion of Soviet intentions veered quickly to the political realm, where equally adamant hawks and doves dominated the debate, often freed from the constraints of intelligence by its unavailability. Operationally, the record is much less clear. Early efforts to foment rebellion within Soviet domains were disasters. Attempts to limit Soviet expansion were uneven. U.S. intelligence operations were successful in Western Europe. Guatemala, and Iran but were failures in Cuba and Southeast Asia. The contra war probably could have been dragged out inconclusively indefinitely. But the intervention against Soviet forces in Afghanistan was a major and telling success. In espionage, U.S. intelligence scored large successes, such as recruiting Col. Oleg Penkovsky, and suffered a number of Soviet penetrations, some of which, notably those conducted by Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. bridged the Soviet and post-Soviet Russian states.
In short, the record of intelligence in the cold war is mixed. Perhaps a better way to pose the original question might be: Would the United States have been better off or more secure without an intelligence community during the cold war?
THE CURRENT NATION STATE ISSUE
 
As was noted in the introduction to this chapter, nation states still form the basic unit of analysis for a great deal of intelligence. Even in the face of abundant transnational issues, the actions of state actors tend to dominate on a regular basis. And even though policy makers want opportunity analysis, the basic means for selecting which nations to focus on remains those that are seen as threatening or as rivals in a serious way.
BOOK: Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy
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