TA recently declassified study on Soviet intentions
during the Cold War identifies significant failures
in U.S. intelligence analysis on Soviet military
intentions and demonstrates the constant exaggeration
of the Soviet threat.
The study, which was released last week by George
Washington University’s National Security
Archive, was prepared by a Pentagon contractor
in 1995 that had access to former senior Soviet
defense officials, military officers, and industrial
specialists. It demonstrates the consistent
U.S. exaggeration of Soviet “aggressiveness”
and the failure to recognize Soviet fears of
a U.S. first strike. The study begs serious
questions about current U.S. exaggeration of
“threats” emanating from Iran, North
Korea, and Afghanistan.
In the 1980s, long after Soviet leader Leonid
Brezhnev signaled reduced growth in Soviet defense
spending, the CIA produced a series of National
Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) titled “Soviet
Capabilities for Strategic Nuclear Conflict,”
which concluded that the Soviet Union sought
“superior capabilities to fight and win
a nuclear war with the United States, and have
been working to improve their chances of prevailing
in such a conflict.”
The notion of winning or prevailing in a nuclear
conflict was, of course, ludicrous in the extreme,
but this did not stop the CIA’s leadership
(Director William Casey and Deputy Director
Robert Gates) from endorsing the view that the
Soviet Red Army could conduct military operations
on a nuclear battlefield and had improved “their
ability to deal with the many contingencies
of such a conflict, and raising the possibility
of outcomes favorable to the USSR.”
The CIA ignored the Soviet slowdown in the growth
of military procurement, exaggerated the capabilities
of important strategic systems, and distorted
the military and economic power of the Warsaw
Pact states. As late as 1986, the CIA reported
that the per capita income of East Germany was
ahead of West Germany and that the national
income per capita was higher in the Soviet Union
than in Italy. Several years later, the Soviet
Union and the Warsaw Pact collapsed, and former
CIA director Stansfield Turner wrote that the
“corporate view” at the CIA “missed
by a mile.”
The Pentagon study demonstrates that the Soviet
military high command “understood the
devastating consequences of nuclear war”
and believed that the use of nuclear weapons
had to be avoided at “all costs.”
Nevertheless, in 1975, presidential chief of
staff Dick Cheney and secretary of defense Donald
Rumsfeld introduced a group of neoconservatives,
led by Harvard professor Richard Pipes, to the
CIA in order to make sure that future NIEs would
falsely conclude that the Soviet Union rejected
nuclear parity, were bent on fighting and winning
a nuclear war, and were radically increasing
their military spending.
The neocons (known as Team B) and the CIA (Team
A) then wrongly predicted a series of Soviet
weapons developments that never took place,
including directed energy weapons, mobile ABM
systems, and anti-satellite capabilities. CIA
deputy director Gates used this worst-case reasoning
in a series of speeches to insinuate himself
with CIA director Bill Casey and the Reagan
administration.
In view of the consistent exaggeration of the
Soviet threat throughout the 1980s, when the
USSR was on a glide path toward collapse, it
is fair to speculate on current geopolitical
situations that are far less threatening than
our policy and intelligence experts assert.
For example, is it reasonable to argue that
the United States needs to deploy a strategic
air defense in Poland and the Czech Republic
to defend against a possible Iranian attack
against Central Europe? How did our military
planners come up with a scenario that projects
Iran’s intentions to target Europe? Why
do we dismiss Russian fears of the deployment
of such a system in two former Warsaw Pact countries
near Russian borders?
North Korea, like Iran, is another country that
provokes irrational behavior and threat assessments
on our part despite its military and economic
backwardness. For the past several months, the
Pyongyang government has consistently signaled
an interest in improving relations with both
the United States and South Korea.
The release of two American journalists and
a South Korean worker as well as an agreement
to allow tourism and family reunions to resume
with the Seoul government point to an effort
to ease relations after months of growing tension.
What is North Korea demanding? Nothing more
than bilateral talks with the United States.
Why is this so difficult?
And why does President Barack Obama consider
Afghanistan to be an “international security
challenge of the highest order” and the
Afghan war a “war that we cannot afford
to lose.” The terrorists who attacked
us on 9/11 were operating independently of any
national government and did most of their organizational
work in Germany and the United States. We were
compelled to rout them from Afghanistan in 2001,
but the wars in Iraq and the continued war in
Afghanistan has not contributed to the security
and stability of the United States.
The exaggeration of the Soviet threat in the
1980s led to an additional trillion and a half
dollars in defense spending against a Soviet
Union that was in decline and a Soviet military
threat that was disappearing. It is time to
recognize the great harm that was done to the
intelligence community and the CIA with the
politicization of intelligence in the 1980s
as well as the militarization of intelligence
over the past twenty years.
If we don’t reform the intelligence process
and create a genuinely independent intelligence
capability there will continue to be threat
exaggerations that cost us greatly in blood
and treasure over the next 10 years.
Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the
Center for International Policy and adjunct
professor of government at Johns Hopkins University,
is The Public Record’s National Security
and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years
with the CIA, the National War College, and
the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of
Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.
Copyright 2009 The Public
Record
