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THE JOY OF INTELLIGENCE
“There were so many things that I did not know when I became president.”
—Harry S. Truman
“The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.”
—Herbert Agar
The term “speaking truth to power” originated with the Quakers in an effort to expand the idea of anti-war pacifism. The term has special meaning in the field of intelligence, which requires giving information to policymakers who prefer not to listen. A key aspect of being an intelligence analyst was the opportunity to tell truth to power.
For most, the CIA’s greatest challenge is the recruitment of spies and the stealing of secrets. For me, the challenge revolved around providing intelligence to policymakers. It meant telling the administrations of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon that the Vietnam War was essentially unwinnable. It meant telling the Pentagon that its views on Soviet weapons systems were wrong, which opened the door to arms control agreements in the 1970s. It meant telling the Carter administration that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had nothing to do with the “urge to the sea,” and telling the Reagan administration that Gorbachev was a different Soviet leader.
This challenge was enhanced by having access to the intelligence community’s vast collection of information: communications intercepts from the National Security Agency (NSA); satellite photography from the National Reconnaissance Office; sensitive cables from the Department of State; field reports from military attachés as well as clandestine reports from CIA operatives. There is a great deal of information in the public arena, but it cannot compare to the collection of the intelligence agencies.
Intelligence work is exhilarating and exhausting, particularly when intelligence analysts accept the importance of informing policymakers of the historical and social factors that should be considered in decision-making regarding U.S. actions in foreign lands. Decisions regarding Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s ignored these factors, and U.S. policy suffered as a result. U.S. decisions on Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria also ignored these factors, and too often U.S. intelligence failed to provide relevant information.
SPOT-ON ABOUT THE SIX-DAY WAR
My baptism as a CIA intelligence analyst took place less than one year after I came onboard. As a member of the task force preparing situation reports for the White House on the increased tensions in the Middle East, I helped to draft the report that described Israel’s preemptive attack against Egypt on the morning of June 5, 1967. We had sensitive NSA intercepts that documented Israeli preparations for an attack and no evidence of an Egyptian battle plan.
The Israelis had been clamoring to Washington that they had indications of Egyptian preparations for an invasion, but the U.S. intelligence community saw no Egyptian readiness in terms of its air or armored power. We assumed that the Israelis were engaging in disinformation in order to gain U.S. support. My own view was that Egypt would be unlikely to start a war with Israel while half of its army was tied down fighting in a civil war in Yemen. My Egyptian colleagues believed that Egyptian president Gamel Abdel Nasser was bluffing, and all of us emphasized the low quality of Cairo’s military equipment.
We were therefore shocked when President Lyndon Johnson’s national security advisor, Walt Rostow, wouldn’t accept our intelligence assessment of the Israeli preemptive attack. Rostow cited “assurances” from the Israeli ambassador in Washington that under no circumstances would the Israelis attack first. Over the protests of Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan, the Israeli government lied to the White House about how the war started. President Johnson was told that the Egyptians had initiated firing on Israeli settlements and that an Egyptian squadron had been observed heading toward Israel. Neither statement was true.
Rostow had convinced the president that Israel would never consider a preemptive attack, and as a result, three days before the war President Johnson’s letter to Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol noted that Israel would be alone if it preempted, but he couldn’t “imagine that [Israel] would make this decision.”1 As a result, our report the morning of June 5, 1967, that described a series of surprise attacks on Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian airfields, met with a hostile response from the National Security Council. Rostow returned the report with some angry remarks, but CIA director Richard Helms supported our decision to return the report with modest and meaningless editorial changes. When the National Military Command Center corroborated our assessment, Rostow summoned Clark Clifford, chairman of the President’s Foreign Advisory Board, to examine the intelligence along with Harold (Hal) Saunders, the leading Arabist on the National Security Council staff. Clifford and Saunders corroborated our assessments.
President Johnson admitted in his memoirs that he strongly disagreed with the CIA estimates regarding a quick Israeli victory and asked Helms to recalculate the intelligence because it seemed so unbelievable. Rostow never conceded his errors of judgment, although he did order the U.S. ambassador, Walworth Barbour, to see Israeli Prime Minister Eshkol and to demand a military briefing on the war. When the ambassador asked if the Egyptians had attacked, the Israelis responded with vague references to movements of Egyptian troops and tanks. The CIA, with the benefit of satellite intelligence, could inform the White House that Egyptian planes were parked on their airfields wingtip-to-wingtip, which pointed to no plan to attack.
Twenty years later, I learned that Harry McPherson, a confidant of the president, was in Israel at the start of the war and accompanied the ambassador to the prime minister’s office. During this meeting, Israeli air raid sirens began to wail, but when the ambassador suggested moving the meeting to the Foreign Ministry’s underground bunker, Israeli intelligence chief General Aharon Yariv assured him it wasn’t necessary. As a result, McPherson concluded that the “Egyptian air force had been destroyed . . . on the ground,” which he immediately cabled to Washington.2 It would have been useful to have this information on a timely basis, but our intelligence indicated that the Israelis had destroyed more than 200 Egyptian planes on the ground.
In any event, Helms stood by our analysis, even when we predicted an Israeli victory in a matter of days. Once again, our analysis differed from that of Rostow’s National Security Council, which believed that Soviet arms shipments to Egypt, Syria, and Iraq would bring a different result than the Israeli success in the Suez crisis of 1956. Some staffers from the National Security Council argued that Israel might even be “driven into the sea.” We predicted an Israeli victory in seven to ten days, which was close enough.
In addition to lying about the start of the war, the Israelis were deceitful in attributing the attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 to a random accident. If so, it was a well-planned accident. The ship was a U.S. intelligence vessel in international waters, both slow-moving and lightly armed. It brandished a five-foot-by-eight-foot Stars and Stripes in the midday sun, and certainly didn’t resemble a ship in any other navy, let alone a ship in the arsenal of one of Israel’s enemies. The Israeli attack took place after six hours of intense, low-level reconnaissance. The attack was conducted over a two-hour period by unmarked Mirage jets using cannons and rockets. Then more jets with napalm and more rockets. Israeli boats fired machine guns at close range at those helping the wounded, then machine-gunned the life rafts that survivors dropped in hope of abandoning ship. The NSA investigation of the disaster remains classified.
As a result of the CIA’s spot-on intelligence, President Johnson invited Helms to attend the White House’s important Tuesday Lunch Group, which until then had only included the president, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and the national security advisor. Helms was generous with his praise for our analytic efforts, but within several years the CIA’s pessimistic and accurate assessments on Vietnam made him an unwelcome member of the group.
CIA SUPPORT FOR ARMS CONTROL AND DISARMAMENT
My headiest experience as an intelligence analyst was an assignment to Vienna in 1971 as intelligence advisor to the U.S. delegation at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). In my 42 years of government service, it was the only time that I was involved in intense diplomatic negotiations, the implementation of strategic policy, and the bureaucratic infighting that complicates formation and implementation of policy. Negotiations between the U.S. agencies were no less difficult and protracted than negotiations between the U.S. and Soviet delegations.
The CIA’s assessments on strategic arms were the best within the U.S. intelligence community, so the SALT experience played an important role in my career as an analyst. The CIA’s ability to verify and monitor all aspects of a disarmament treaty, particularly the development and deployment of Soviet strategic forces, enabled the U.S. Senate to ratify the SALT and Anti-Ballistic Missile treaties with confidence.
The CIA plays an important role in allaying the concerns of U.S. congress members, both liberal and conservative, regarding the verification and monitoring of international treaties. This was particularly true in 1972, when there was a great deal of opposition to the SALT and Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaties. Informal CIA briefings to influential senators such as John Glenn (D-OH), and formal briefings to key committees such as Foreign Relations and Armed Services, contributed to congressional approval of the treaties. Tensions between the White House and Congress over the nuclear deal with Iran in 2015 were alleviated by expert CIA briefings to recalcitrant members of Congress.
In order to prepare for a role in the world of strategic arms control, I had to leave the Office of Current Intelligence, which concentrated on political intelligence, and spend two years in the Office of Strategic Research, which studied the Soviet strategic arsenal. It was a world of obscure acronyms—MIRVs, SLBMs, SSBN, ABMs, and ICBMs—and special terms—throw weight, counterforce, countervalue—that had little currency outside the national security community. Fortunately, the chief of the Office of Strategic Research, Bruce Clarke, was one of the genuine stars in the Intelligence Directorate and offered a great deal of assistance in my first months on the job. When I couldn’t get a handle on Soviet strategic submarines that were nuclear-capable, Clarke said it should be easy for me: the J-class, E-class, W-class, and S-class. Clarke assumed that a Jew could grasp this.
The disarmament process was an interagency one, requiring every aspect of the negotiations to be vetted by five major U.S. policy departments before being broached with the Soviets. The CIA typically lined up with the Department of State and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency on the disarmament process; the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were dedicated to blocking arms control. The CIA played the key role in enabling civilian agencies to overcome opposition from the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which falsely argued that a Soviet ground-to-air missile defense could be upgraded to an anti-ballistic missile system and that the Soviet SS-9 had multiple warheads. The military’s arguments were designed to block the Anti-Ballistic Missile and SALT agreements, respectively.
One of the major blunders in the SALT I treaty was the failure to ban multiple warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles. Even Secretary of State Kissinger acknowledged this failure as a serious policy blunder. The Department of State, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and the CIA favored a ban and strongly believed prohibition of multiple-warhead missile testing could be verified with satellite photography. The Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to pursue production of multiple-warhead missiles, which they had not yet developed, so an opportunity was lost to put a ban on multiple-warhead missiles in the treaty. The militarization of the CIA and the dissolution of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency complicate the bureaucratic task of reaching a new consensus on any disarmament treaty.
One of the key reasons for the opposition of presidential Chief of Staff Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to the CIA (and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency) in the 1970s was these agencies’ support for arms control. The conflict was renewed during the administration of President George W. Bush, when the CIA pushed back against some of their arguments for invading Iraq. Overall, however, the CIA caved in to Cheney’s importuning.
My major job as intelligence advisor to the SALT delegation in Vienna was preparing a daily briefing for the delegates, providing the opportunity to discuss political and military issues with the chief of the U.S. delegation, Ambassador Gerald Smith; the Joint Chiefs of Staff representative, General Royal Allison; the Department of Defense representative, Paul Nitze; the Department of State representative, Ambassador Raymond L. Garthoff; and the representative from the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Harold Brown. The Nitze briefing was the toughest one because he followed all military and political issues and had definite ideas about the intelligence problems associated with geopolitical issues, not merely strategic weapons issues. He was initially unfriendly to negotiating with the Soviets, although he reversed course and led the efforts to eliminate all intermediate nuclear forces 15 years later. I assisted Nitze in other ways, because he had a drinking problem and I had to help him make his goodbyes from several social occasions.
The Brown briefing was easy, because he wasn’t interested in getting intelligence briefings; in fact, he was often not in attendance at the talks in Vienna. When the bilateral discussions became intense, Brown was around; when they grew desultory, Brown wasn’t even in Austria. General Allison was an interesting figure, because his riding boots were always on his desk, either returning from being shined or placed to be picked up for shining, which was a daily ritual for the general’s enlisted aide. Only the general, of course, had an aide. Briefing Ray Garthoff was a pure pleasure; he was one of the savviest people I dealt with in my 24 years at the CIA and the State Department.
The assignment in Vienna offered discussions on arms control and geopolitical issues with Soviet counterparts, including representatives of Soviet intelligence, the KGB. Whereas U.S. representatives had a rich social life that included trips to the Vienna opera and wonderful banquets, the Soviets did not permit their representatives to mix with the Austrian populace, let alone other diplomatic representatives. When I discussed this fact with my Soviet counterparts, they replied that they were simply “birds in a gilded cage.” The Soviet delegation didn’t even have access to secure communications back to Moscow, and had to travel to Czechoslovakia to report sensitive negotiating matters to the Kremlin.
The CIA’s role in the arms control process was a central one, because no treaty would garner Senate ratification unless the U.S. intelligence community could verify all aspects of the terms. Director Helms didn’t like having the CIA identified with verification of the treaties; he told us at a meeting in his office that “verification was a political process, and only policy agencies could verify” a treaty. He preferred to call the interagency process the Monitoring Panel, but Kissinger preferred the title “Verification Panel,” and verification it became.
Kissinger understood that throughout the Cold War the CIA had the best record in tracking Soviet weapons developments, which ensured that Moscow never developed or procured, let alone deployed, a strategic weapon without the CIA analysts providing advance warning to the National Security Council and the Pentagon. Sadly, several decades later, the CIA’s mishandling of Iraqi weapons assessments in 2002–2003 compromised the Agency’s credibility, leading to the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2004 and diminishing the role of the director of CIA in producing the President’s Daily Brief and National Intelligence Estimates.
Disarmament negotiations made little progress from 1969 to 1971, until the Vienna round that coincided with the beginning of the U.S.-China rapprochement. Soviet representatives at SALT understood that the U.S.-inspired initiative was aimed at Moscow. As a result, the Kremlin knew it must improve relations with the United States by coming to terms with the SALT agreement to limit offensive strategic ballistic missiles; the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to protect strategic deterrence; and the Treaty of Berlin to quell tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union around the divided city of Berlin. My background cables from Vienna emphasized that Soviet anxiety over the new Washington-Beijing diplomatic channel provided opportunities for the United States. I was not crossing the line into policy advocacy; I was merely calling attention to an opportunity for the United States, a key aspect of intelligence reporting.
The Soviets feared rapprochement between the United States and China would be at their expense, diminishing the importance of the Kremlin’s ties with Washington. Prior to the news of an improvement in Sino-American relations, the Soviets pursued an unorthodox device to bring the United States into a bilateral treaty against Beijing. In Vienna in March 1971, in the best spy-novel tradition, the Soviet ambassador to SALT, Vladimir Semenov, passed a note to his U.S. counterpart, Ambassador Smith, proposing a bilateral agreement to prevent or retaliate against a provocative attack by third parties (i.e., China). Kissinger believed the proposal was a Soviet attempt to get a free hand against China in a crisis situation without concern for the U.S. response. Semenov’s initiative demonstrated the Kremlin’s concern with a Sino-American rapprochement, and thus pointed to an opportunity for U.S. diplomatic dividends.
The unsigned note called for Moscow and Washington to take retaliatory action if one or the other were attacked by a third party. Both Moscow and Washington were using the SALT dialogue to prevent accidental or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons, which led to the Agreement on Measures to Reduce the Risk of Outbreak of Nuclear War in September 1971, but Semenov’s initiative was a bizarre effort to draw the Soviet Union closer to the United States and to make sure that China remained an outsider looking in. I was one of the few members of the U.S. delegation aware of the Soviet proposal, because sensitive State Department cables went through CIA communications, which were more secure.
What none of us knew in Vienna was that Kissinger immediately used the back channel to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to reject Semenov’s proposal. It was typical for Kissinger to take matters into his own hands in this fashion and not inform U.S. diplomats who were discussing sensitive matters with Soviet counterparts. We were caught off guard by Moscow’s use of the SALT dialogue to collude against China, which would have been a major success for the Soviet Union if it had worked, but the Nixon White House would never accept a Soviet initiative that would have given Moscow a free hand against Beijing.
It was no accident that within several months after the announcement of ping-pong matches between the U.S. and China, an understanding was reached in May 1971 to conclude an Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and a treaty to limit offensive missiles. A U.S.-Soviet summit meeting for 1972 was agreed upon in addition to the Berlin agreement that prevented the kind of con-frontations that had occurred in 1948–1949, 1958–1959, and 1961, which led to the building of the Berlin Wall. It was exciting to be an eyewitness—even from the back bench—to events that led to an U.S.-Soviet summit and détente; North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s readiness to accept a Conference on European Security and Cooperation; and the Warsaw Pact’s willingness to join the Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction talks. Nearly a decade after the Cuban missile crisis, the Cold War ice was breaking up.
The SALT and ABM agreements were a great achievement in U.S. national security policy, but key members of the SALT delegation lost their careers in arms control as a result. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA), who gets far more praise for his congressional career than he deserves, demanded that the leaders at the State Department and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency who worked on the SALT and Anti-Ballistic Missile treaties never again work in the disarmament field. In January 1973, President Nixon, who was honored by many for his achievements in the fields of détente and disarmament, bowed before Senator Jackson’s insistence that his vote for ratification of the treaties (as well as the Trident submarine program) depended on a purge of the SALT delegation, even a hard-liner such as General Allison. Garthoff, the most important member of the U.S. delegation, was made ambassador to Bulgaria. In addition to purging delegates to the SALT talks, President Nixon purged 14 of the top 17 Arms Control and Disarmament Agency officials. The agency’s budget and personnel were cut and a conservative leadership was introduced. Two decades later, President Clinton bowed to pressure from Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) and Representative Newt Gingrich (R-GE) and finished the job by abolishing the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency altogether. Neither Nixon nor Clinton referred in their memoirs to their pusillanimous behavior in confronting a form of McCarthyism.
THE CIA’S ROLE IN THE ARTIFICIAL “COMBAT BRIGADE” CRISIS IN CUBA
Debates over intelligence are hard fought and often tendentious, and the public rarely learns about the political differences between intelligence agencies. One such debate took place in the fall of 1979, when the NSA intercepted a Soviet message that referred to a “combat brigade” in Cuba. A combat brigade of less than 3,000 men that had no airlift capability or sea transport did not represent a threat comparable to a possible Soviet submarine base as in 1970 or the deployment of Soviet MiG-23s as in 1978, let alone the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. But the fate of SALT II between Washington and Moscow hung in the balance, and national security advisor Brzezinski, no friend of Moscow or of détente, feared any effort by the Kremlin to steal a march on the United States. As a result, he put a great deal of pressure on the CIA and its national intelligence officer on the Soviet Union, Arnold Horelick, to find evidence of any Soviet chicanery.
Brzezinski and his military assistant, Colonel William Odom, both anti-Soviet and anti-disarmament, were fearful that Moscow would exploit the period during the run-up to the scheduled summit between President Carter and General Secretary Brezhnev in Vienna, where the SALT II agreement would be signed. Brzezinski asked CIA director Turner to take a hard look at all intelligence dealing with Soviet activities in Cuba and to increase intelligence collection over the island with a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. Brzezinski and Horelick spoke often on a secure line during this period, and the subject of possible Soviet violations of agreements regarding Cuba was a hot topic.
The “threat” turned out to be the possibility of a Soviet combat brigade in Cuba. In 1962, Moscow had deployed ground combat units to Cuba at four major locations as part of its deployment of medium- and intermediate-range missiles. General Secretary Khrushchev withdrew all ground forces that were protecting missile installations or bombers as part of the diplomatic agreement that ended the crisis. The so-called combat brigade was located at one of these four locations, which contributed to the confusion over the unit.
The combat brigade, however, was a praetorian guard for Castro that pre-dated the Cuban missile crisis, and Moscow had reason to assume that U.S. intelligence would confirm this. Therefore, they believed Carter was creating an “artificial issue” to avoid fighting for the ratification of a SALT treaty in a recalcitrant Senate. When a powerful opponent of détente with the Soviet Union and arms control, Senator Henry Jackson, leaked intelligence on the “brigade” and used the information to attack the treaty and the Soviet Union, there was grist for the Soviet mill.
Ignoring our concerns, Horelick immediately proposed “warning notices” regarding the combat brigade to the policy community, which created the impression of an impending crisis. Several of us took the position that there was nothing new about references to a combat brigade, and attempted to convince Horelick not to push an intelligence panic button that was nothing more than an exercise we referred to as CYA—“cover your ass.” We were the contrarians within the analytical community, challenging the conventional wisdom in order to defuse the crisis atmosphere that Brzezinksi and Horelick were creating. Our arguments to Horelick were both sane and sound, and—more importantly—correct. Unfortunately, the CYA exercise prevailed, which often happens in the intelligence community, particularly with military intelligence.
The State Department contributed to the crisis atmosphere by leaking news of the intelligence to two liberal senators, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Frank Church (D-ID), and Richard Stone (D-FL), who favored ratification of the SALT II agreement. The Department believed that Church and Stone, both influential within their party, would tamp down speculation of a possible Soviet violation of agreements that ended the Cuban missile crisis. Church and Stone were facing election challenges in their states from neoconservatives, however, and they exploited the intelligence they were given.
Provocative rhetoric from two dovish senators put the Carter administration on the defensive, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance made it worse when he proclaimed on September 5, 1979, that this was a “very serious matter affecting our relations with the Soviet Union.” Church put the ratification of SALT II on the back burner, and presented himself as a tough foe of the Soviet Union. No one anticipated that he would take a hawkish stance and put an important arms control agreement at risk, because he was an experienced political figure and a strong supporter of SALT. He demanded the withdrawal of the Soviet force, a gratuitous demand. Seventeen years earlier, however, the Kennedy administration had falsely assured Senator Church that the Soviets hadn’t introduced missiles into Cuba, which led the right wing in Idaho to vilify him.
Stone, moreover, decided to pander to his anti-Castro constituency. He cited leaks from NSA staffers regarding a recent buildup of Soviet forces in Cuba, “perhaps as much as a brigade,” which proved to be wrong. Stone joined the Republican opponents of arms control, led by Senator Robert Dole (R-KS), who would not begin ratification hearings for SALT II until Soviet troops were withdrawn from Cuba. Ironically, as mentioned, the so-called combat brigade had been placed in Cuba prior to the Cuban missile crisis and was permitted to remain there to prevent a U.S. invasion similar to the Bay of Pigs, the CIA’s “perfect failure” in 1961.
The combat brigade “crisis” and the misuse of intelligence led to election defeats of both Church and Stone as well as the failure to gain ratification of SALT II, intended as a major keystone of the Carter administration. This led to a fundamental weakening of Soviet-American détente that wasn’t corrected until President Reagan’s second term, when Washington returned to arms control with Moscow. This was a classic example of intelligence being mishandled by the National Security Agency, poorly analyzed by the CIA, and misused by the Carter administration and the State Department. We have no idea what the Soviet leaders concluded from this amateurism, but they had reason to believe that Carter had lost interest in détente and arms control or that there was a right-wing conspiracy to block SALT II. In view of Moscow’s predilection for conspiracy, it probably assumed conspiracy.
The intelligence community had dropped the ball, and the CIA contributed to an unnecessary flap. The National Security Agency failed to have good archival records that would have established that the brigade had been in Cuba prior to the missile crisis, had no connection with Cuban combat units, and never should have been labeled a “combat” unit. The CIA, led by National Intelligence Officer Horelick, was too quick to accommodate the importuning of Brzezinski by issuing warning notices that added fuel to an unnecessary fire regarding Soviet intentions prior to a summit meeting and the signing of a strategic arms agreement.
The brigade did not compromise, let alone violate, the Soviet-American understandings about Soviet activities in Cuba. As with the unnecessary missile alert six years earlier during the October War, when Kissinger misused sensitive intelligence, the Soviets were left to scratch their heads and try to determine U.S. reasons and motivations for an unnecessary flap that brought détente to a halt. The CIA was created to provide the institutional memory on these occasions when new and inexperienced administrations lack a political background.
The media contributed to the crisis atmosphere, which is typical in these situations. Time magazine carried an article on “The Storm over Cuba” with a photograph captioned “Soviet-Built Intelligence Station in Cuba.” The station was described as an “advanced electronic monitoring complex east of Havana,” but it was a complex that had been built by an American company, ITT, before Castro took power in 1959. Flawed CIA intelligence on Cuba and Iran in 1979 undermined confidence in President Carter, which contributed to his election defeat in 1980. Presently, the mainstream media are playing up the notion of a renewed Cold War, which is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy
Even though the Carter administration and the CIA were wrong about the combat brigade, Brzezinski remained stubbornly critical of “backing down” to Moscow, and it was the one time in his stewardship as national security advisor that he considered resigning. He angered the president by arguing that the Kremlin would find weakness in U.S. reaction and therefore would miscalculate in the future, citing the relationship between Khrushchev and Kennedy that contributed to the Cuban missile crisis. Brzezinski took no responsibility for the mishandling of the issue, and blamed the State Department for “inexcusably precipitating the crisis with premature briefings” to the senators. His stewardship for U.S. national security policy did more harm than good during the Carter era.
THE CIA’S DISPUTE WITH THE WHITE HOUSE ON AFGHANISTAN
Policy and intelligence communities can have different explanations for crucial events. I was in the middle of such a dispute in the winter of 1979–1980, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the Carter administration wanted to justify a strong response to Moscow’s use of force. The debate began in the intelligence community in the first months of 1979, when I was the first analyst to draft an assessment that argued the Soviets would use force to prevent the Afghan civil war from spilling over to their Muslim republics. I wrote a warning memorandum to that effect that was circulated throughout the policy community in March and April, receiving special attention in the Pentagon, where Doug MacEachin—a former colleague—was serving a rotational tour as a warnings officer.
When the Soviet invasion did take place in December, there were factions, led by Secretary of State Vance and National Security Advisor Brzezinski, that found Soviet actions morally and politically unacceptable. President Carter led the U.S. reaction to Moscow’s actions, which he repeatedly characterized as the “greatest threat to peace since the Second World War.” Brzezinski, who typically took a conspiratorial view of Soviet decision-making, was out in front of the December invasion, having put in place covert support against Soviet interests in Afghanistan months before the actual invasion. The CIA’s clandestine operatives were aware of this at the time; intelligence analysts weren’t.
As author of the first piece of premonitory intelligence, in March 1979, that anticipated the Soviet use of force, and as branch chief for Soviet–Third World policy, I was selected to go to Brussels in January 1980 to brief the NATO delegations on the reasons for the Soviet invasion and the likely short- and long-term outcomes. The U.S. delegation was unhappy with my presentation, because it didn’t argue the Brzezinski line that the Soviet move was a harbinger of more aggressive actions throughout the region, the first step in the Soviet desire to move to the Indian Ocean. This was the position of Secretary Vance, and the U.S. delegation to NATO wanted confirmation of his position in order to get the European delegations to support forceful actions. The recent U.S. overreaction to Russian policy toward Ukraine suggests that history may be repeating itself.
I had no prior guidance from either an intelligence or policy perspective prior to my briefing trip to NATO. I was accompanied by a military analyst who provided a nuts-and-bolts assessment of Soviet military operations in Afghanistan, while I was given carte blanche to discuss all political aspects of Soviet decision-making, particularly their reasons for resorting to military force. I was rather relaxed about the briefing trip, but my military counterpart was extremely nervous about protecting the sensitive intelligence information he carried in a CIA-supplied aluminum suitcase that never left his side. I had been given a similar aluminum suitcase for my assignment in Vienna in 1971, but I refused to use it because of its obvious, practically ostentatious appearance.
My intelligence presentation was radically different from the views of Vance and Brzezinski. As a result, I was not invited back to Brussels for additional briefings to NATO, although I led background briefings to members of the Washington press corps, who traveled to CIA headquarters on a regular basis. I was told by Karen House of the Wall Street Journal and many others that the CIA briefings were the best of any policy or intelligence agency. Intelligence analysts have a decided advantage in these briefing sessions, because, unlike policy analysts, they can simply tell it like it is without a policy axe to grind. It was difficult to be a contrarian in the intelligence community; it was virtually impossible in the policy community.
Intelligence analysts had an easier assignment than policymakers because they did not have to exaggerate the Soviet invasion’s impact on Soviet-American relations, which in my analysis was a separate, albeit related, issue. Vance and Brzezinski considered the Soviet invasion a threat to the balance of power, which in my analysis was not a primary motive of Moscow’s actions. The key difference between Vance and Brzezinski was over whether the Soviets could be made to withdraw. Vance was stubbornly optimistic that Moscow would withdraw; Brzezinski didn’t agree and, as an anti-Soviet ideologue, was far more interested in providing enticement for the Soviets to increase their presence in Afghanistan in order to bring détente to a halt.
Unlike Kissinger and earlier Vance, Brzezinski was never deferential to the idea of keeping détente alive. Brzezinski considered this an important opportunity for the United States to draw the Soviet Union into greater conflict on its borders. I didn’t know about Brzezinski’s views at the time, and, because of the bureaucratic wall at the CIA between intelligence analysis and operations, I didn’t know about the aggressive covert steps that had been taken by CIA operatives in Afghanistan. I eventually learned that Brzezinski believed that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the “most direct case of Soviet military aggression since 1945,” requiring a “broad strategic response.”3 He was appalled when Secretary of State Vance and his Soviet advisor, Marshall Shulman, favored taking the initiative to improve relations with the Kremlin. Brzezinski and Shulman were academic rivals at Columbia University and policy rivals in the Carter administration. When I was on the faculty of the National War College, I made sure that Shulman delivered an annual lecture to the class on Soviet-American relations. The fact that he wheeled in annually on his Harley-Davidson was a huge hit with his military audience.
My analysis of the situation had nothing to do with détente or covert action. In early 1979 I drafted my paper on possible Soviet force when, in the wake of the abduction and assassination of the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolph “Spike” Dubs, I concluded that Moscow was playing a heavy role in Afghan affairs and would use force to maintain this role in Kabul as well as to prevent the emergence of a radical Islamist regime in Afghanistan, a battle that is still being waged. I argued that Moscow would not let the Afghan situation worsen; that they had great concerns about the leadership of Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin, who was an unpredictable hard-liner; and that there was no evidence that Moscow had plans beyond Afghanistan itself. I believed the Soviets were convinced that the United States would find a way to return to Iran after its ouster in 1979 and that they wanted to be in Afghanistan to counter that eventuality.
I was satisfied with my two days of briefing in Brussels in January 1980, but there were policymakers who wanted the NATO delegations to echo the so-called threat to the balance of power and to prepare for harsh measures, including sanctions, against the Soviet Union. The comparison with the current situation in Ukraine is revealing, with the Obama administration divided over the proper response and some European nations opposed to additional harsh sanctions. Once again, the issue of the threat assessment is important to both policymakers and intelligence analysts, but the former typically exaggerate the threat in order to ramp up policy, maintain support from the American public, and arrange for Allied unanimity. Presently, the Obama administration is exaggerating the Russian threat in East Europe for similar reasons.
Intelligence analysts are often caught between intelligence information and policy considerations, the problem of being caught between the fire hydrant and the pissing dog. If the past is any guide, policy demands will trump the intelligence evidence and lead to greater exaggeration of the threat, which will be reflected in media accounts of the crisis based on official and anonymous sources. The exaggerations that accompany the Terror Wars are another example of the mishandling of the threat.
I was never told that there was unhappiness with my briefings in Brussels, and never suffered personally or professionally from going off the policy reservation with my analysis. I went back to work analyzing Soviet actions in the Third World, and remained initially oblivious to the actions of the CIA Directorate of Operations on behalf of the Mujahideen. I was certainly aware of the covert aid by 1986, when I was leaving the building on the way to an assignment as a faculty member at the National War College. Prior to my departure, I encountered the CIA’s chief of operations in Afghanistan, Milton Bearden, and offered my criticism of military assistance for fundamentalist groups that had taken up residence in Pakistan’s disputed territories. Bearden merely replied, “We simply send the arms over there and will let God sort it out.” God is still sorting, and probably won’t be finished until the United States completes its withdrawal, a distant objective three decades later.
Bob Gates wrote in his CIA memoir that covert action in Afghanistan marked the greatest clandestine adventure of all. My own view is radically different. I believe that the most vehemently anti-American Islamists currently operating in Afghanistan are part of the very organizations, such as the Haqqani network and the forces of Gulbiddin Hekmatyar, that the CIA assisted, which tags military support as a glaring CIA failure. Afghan militants such as Haqqani and Hekmatyar have long been considered “global terrorists” by the intelligence community. There were individuals linked to al Qaeda that received support from the CIA. The United States took steps against the perceived ideology of the Soviet Union, only to create a more virulent ideological enemy, militant Islamic jihadism. We have been at war with this new historical enemy for three decades.
With the president, the secretary of state, and the national security advisor in complete agreement that Moscow’s invasion would be followed by additional Soviet force to “improve its strategic position in Southwest Asia,” the role of intelligence was severely circumscribed. Even Secretary Vance anticipated that the Soviets would try to exploit events in Iran, exert “strong influence and pressure” on Pakistan and India, and counter U.S. moves into the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. Brzezinski believed that the Soviet move into Afghanistan would lead to the “domination of Afghanistan,” the promotion of a “separate Baluchistan,” access to the Indian Ocean, and the dismemberment of Pakistan and Iran. The intelligence evidence suggested the Soviet move into Afghanistan was a defensive one, but the political record was dominated by those who believed it was an offensive one that had to be countered.
Vance’s memoirs show him to be a prime example of a headstrong policymaker who had little interest in the intelligence evidence on Afghanistan. He had many false notions about the USSR and Afghanistan that intelligence could have corrected, and no understanding of the domestic political situation in Afghanistan or Moscow’s concerns with spillover of the violence into the Muslim republics in the Soviet Union. He underestimated Moscow’s concerns with political instability in Kabul, and even confused the two key Afghan leaders fighting for supremacy, Nur Mohammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin.
Vance ignored Moscow’s security concerns in the region, and both Vance and Brezhnev wanted to use the Afghan situation to return to the policy of containment that President Nixon and Kissinger had abandoned. President Obama’s conservative critics used the crisis over Crimea and Ukraine to return to the case for containment as well.
CONVINCING THE PRESIDENT OF THE SOVIET “WAR SCARE”
Unlike the CIA’s handling of the Soviet combat brigade, an analytical failure with negative consequences for U.S. policy, the handling of the Soviet “war scare” in 1983 was an analytical success, convincing President Reagan that Moscow genuinely feared the United States was planning a surprise attack against the Soviet Union. Many politicians and pundits in the United States believe to this day that the war scare in Moscow was no more than Soviet disinformation. My reading of the intelligence materials and my understanding of U.S. military exercises as well as my debriefing in 1985 of the former deputy KGB chief in London, Oleg Gordievsky, convinced me that the war scare was real. I was part of a small group of analysts who convinced Director Casey that the scare was genuine, which led Casey to carry the message personally to President Reagan. This was a rare occasion when Casey sided with his Soviet analysts over the objections of his deputy director for intelligence, Bob Gates.
Once the British had exhausted Gordievsky’s knowledge of the war scare and Soviet operational activities, they delivered him to the U.S. intelligence community for debriefings. According to Gordievsky, who was recruited by British intelligence in 1970 after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the KGB had demanded information from all KGB stations regarding the possibility of U.S. preparations for an imminent nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. This order from the KGB “Center” in Moscow took place during the week-long Able Archer exercise, and, although not all KGB officials overseas shared the view of such a possible attack, the “Center” was convinced. Soviet military doctrine, according to Ray Garthoff, had long held that a possible U.S. modus operandi for launching an attack would be to convert an exercise into the real thing.
For the first time, the exercise was going to include President Reagan, Vice President Bush, and Secretary of Defense Weinberger, but when the White House understood the extent of Soviet anxiety regarding U.S. intentions, the major principals dropped out. In his memoirs, Reagan did not mention Gordievsky, but he noted that he was surprised to learn that Soviet leaders were afraid of an American first strike. More importantly, one of the reasons why Secretary of State Shultz was able to convince President Reagan of the need for summit meetings with his Soviet counterpart in 1985 was the president’s belief that it was necessary to convince Moscow that the United States had no plans for an attack.
Although it was not known to the American public at the time, 1983 was the most dangerous year in Soviet-U.S. relations since the Cuban missile crisis. Moscow and Washington were going in different directions, with Reagan declaring a political and military campaign against the “Evil Empire” while Soviet leaders, in the wake of the death of Brezhnev, were looking to end the confrontation that was hurting the Kremlin. The intelligence in that year made it clear that the Soviet Union was in a downward spiral internationally, marked by the quagmire in Afghanistan; the drain of funds in developing countries, particularly Cuba; political and military setbacks in Angola and Nicaragua where covert actions were limiting pro-Soviet regimes; and the growing cost of competing with the largest peacetime increases in the U.S. defense budget since the end of World War II. Soviet leaders believed that the “correlation of world forces,” Soviet terminology in weighing the international balance, was working against the interests of Moscow and that the U.S. government was in the hands of a dangerous anti-Soviet crowd. The Kremlin seemed to have good intelligence on its American problem.
The events of 1983 pointed to a renewal of the Cold War, which made the role of intelligence analysis at the Agency more immediate and controversial. President Reagan began to refer to the Soviet Union as the “focus of evil in the world” and an “evil empire.” The new Soviet general secretary, Yuri Andropov, the former chief of the KGB, suggested that President Reagan was insane and a liar. U.S. media paid close attention to Reagan’s sensational charges, and Soviet media launched a verbal offensive that matched Reagan’s rhetoric. Reagan was compared to Hitler and accused of “fanning the flames of war.” Andropov was portrayed in the U.S. press as a Red Darth Vadar. Reagan’s demonization of several Soviet leaders was counter-productive; the same could be said for Obama’s demonization of Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation at the time of this writing.
European media were declaring the resumption of the Cold War, comparing the crisis in the early 1980s to the Berlin blockade in 1948 and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. These were exaggerations, but any level of tension in relations between Moscow and Washington created reminders of previous confrontations. Soviet-American détente and arms control were pushed to the background, and the possibilities of superpower conflict to the foreground.
The public’s reaction in 1983 would have been more tense if it had shared Soviet knowledge of aggressive U.S. military exercises and intelligence activities. The Reagan administration authorized unusually aggressive military exercises near the Soviet border that, in some cases, violated Soviet territorial sovereignty. American, European, and Soviet publics had no knowledge of the “war scare” in the Kremlin, particularly Operation RYAN, a sensitive KGB collection operation launched to determine whether the United States was planning a surprise nuclear attack.
One of the great mutual misunderstandings between the Soviet Union and the United States was that both sides feared surprise attack. The United States suffered psychologically from the Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, and it has still not recovered from 9/11. At the same time, the United States has never appreciated that Moscow has similar fears due to Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion in the same year as Pearl Harbor, a far more devastating assault.
One of the great ironies of WWII is that the United States and the Soviet Union both suffered from surprise attack, although both had the intelligence capacity to limit, if not prevent, the attacks. The intelligence failures contributed to the national traumas caused by these attacks, which marked the worst military disasters in their history. U.S. leaders should be more aware of the impact of this trauma on their Russian counterparts. This was not the case for President Reagan, who issued a radio warning into an open mic in August 1984 that “I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” Those of us in the intelligence community who understood the importance of de-escalating the possibility of war with the Russians weren’t amused.
Russia’s fear of surprise attack was accentuated in 1983, when the Reagan administration deployed the Army’s Pershing-II missile and land-based cruise missiles in Europe as a counter to the Soviet Union’s SS-20 missiles. The SS-20 was not considered a “strategic” weapon because of its limited range—3,000 miles, well short of the United States. The P-II, however, could not only reach the Soviet Union, but could destroy Moscow’s command and control systems. Since the Soviets would have limited warning time—less than five minutes—the P-II was viewed as a first-strike weapon that could destroy the Soviet early warning system. I asked Undersecretary of Defense Lynn Davis whether anyone in the Pentagon thought of the P-II as a first-strike weapon, and she appeared nonplussed. Currently, U.S. policymakers fail to understand Moscow’s legitimate concerns with the deployment of a regional missile defense in Poland and Romania.
In addition to the huge strategic advantage from the P-II and numerous cruise missiles, the U.S. deployment of the MX missile and the D-5 Trident submarine placed the Soviets in an inferior position with regard to strategic modernization. Overall, the United States held an advantage in political, economic, and military resources. The United States and NATO presently have significant advantages over Russia, which makes the current exaggeration of the threat particularly odious.
President Reagan authorized a high-risk psychological warfare program to intimidate the Kremlin, including dangerous probes of Soviet borders by the U.S. Navy and Air Force. These activities were unknown to intelligence analysts at the CIA. In fact, very few U.S. officials at the White House or the Pentagon were fully briefed on these measures. These risky operations included sending strategic bombers over the North Pole to test Soviet radar, as well as conducting exercises in maritime approaches to the Soviet Union where U.S. warships had never previously ventured. There were secret operations that simulated surprise naval air attacks on Soviet targets. Operation RYAN was a response to the detected aspects of the U.S. psychological warfare campaign, which began several months after President Reagan was inaugurated.
The CIA was at a disadvantage in trying to analyze the war scare, because a major flaw in the intelligence process is the unwillingness of the Pentagon to share U.S. military maneuvers and weapons deployments with the CIA. The CIA was slow to anticipate Soviet military maneuvers in the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean because there was no awareness of U.S. deployments of strategic submarines in those waters, which led to a Soviet response. In 1983, the CIA had no idea that the Pentagon’s annual Able Archer military exercise would be conducted in a provocative fashion with high-level participation. The exercise was a test of U.S. command and communications procedures, including procedures for the release and use of nuclear weapons in case of war.
The intelligence community was unwitting of these provocative exercises, and the CIA regularly turned out National Intelligence Estimates that assessed indications of an “abnormal Soviet fear of conflict with the United States.” The national intelligence officer for Soviet strategic weapons, Larry Gershwin, believed that any notion of a Soviet fear of an American attack was risible, but six years later the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board concluded that there had been a “serious concern” in the Kremlin over a possible U.S. attack. I believed that Soviet fears were genuine at the time, and President Reagan’s national security advisor, Robert McFarlane, remarked, “We got their attention” but “maybe we overdid it.” At the time of this writing in 2016, Gershwin, who manipulated intelligence on strategic matters throughout the 1980s, is still at the CIA as a national intelligence officer. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
INTELLIGENCE LESSONS LEARNED
It would be wonderful if intelligence could predict the future, but it can’t. Good intelligence should at least be able to create the possibility of better, more effective national defense, but that is similarly uncertain. In 1972, with the benefit of excellent clandestine sources, I learned that Egyptian president Anwar Sadat had decided to expel the Soviet military presence from his country, because he had concluded (correctly) that Moscow would never take military risks to challenge the Israeli occupation of Egyptian territory. But it was also likely that the ouster of the Soviet advisors was designed to attract the attention of the United States and provide an opening for pressure from Washington on Israel to get serious about direct talks with Cairo over the Israeli occupation. Kissinger called Director Helms to thank him for premonitory intelligence that he did not acquire from the media. I received a call from Helms’s office thanking me for the assessment and noting that it was well received in the White House. But it did not lead to any policy considerations of a new diplomatic opening in the Middle East that could have advanced the cause of peace and stability.
In a rare passage in his memoir, Kissinger conceded that the national security advisor first turns to the CIA for the “facts in a crisis and for analysis of events.” He was particularly complimentary toward Helms for “never misusing his intelligence or his power.” Helms knew that his integrity guaranteed his effectiveness, that his best weapon with presidents was a reputation for reliability.
The sad fact is that accurate intelligence is no assurance of effective national security policy, but intelligence failure will surely compromise the possibility for effective policy. If the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had been reading the CIA’s estimates on Vietnam in the 1960s, there would have been good reasons for not escalating forces in Southeast Asia. But Kennedy was convinced of the need to check what he believed to be the actions of a Soviet proxy, which North Vietnam wasn’t, and Johnson was insufficiently confident to follow his intuition against the policy arguments of the so-called “best and brightest,” the key players of the Kennedy administration, particularly the Rostow brothers (Walt and Eugene) and the Bundy brothers (McGeorge and Bill) as well as Secretaries Rusk and McNamara.
Two decades later, if the Reagan administration had been paying attention to CIA intelligence on the Middle East, perhaps President Reagan would have thought twice about accepting the advice of National Security Advisor Colonel Robert McFarlane, who pressed the president to send U.S. Marines into Beirut in 1983 to pull Israeli chestnuts out of the fire in Lebanon. Thus began the downward spiral in Lebanon that continues to this day. If the Bush administration had not been committed to the use of force in Iraq 20 years later, then perhaps the initial intelligence assessments of the Arabists at the CIA would have indicated that Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld were wrong about a “cakewalk” for the U.S. military.
The policy process will always overrule the intelligence process when there are differences between the two. Policymakers look for intelligence to further their own agenda; they typically reject and even resent a contrary viewpoint. National Security Advisor Rostow displayed typical stubbornness when he believed that “assurance” about preemptive war from the Israeli ambassador would trump authoritative signals intelligence from the National Security Agency and the assessments of the CIA. When intelligence assessments differed from policy assessments, President Nixon dismissed the analysts as “the clowns” at Langley.
