The CIA vindicated: the Soviet collapse was predicted.

• Author: Berkowitz, Bruce D.

"The CIA failed in its single, overriding defining mission, which was to chart the course of Soviet affairs." -- Daniel Patrick Moynihan, quoted by Bill Gertz, Washington Times, May 21, 1992.

"The CIA [has] come under legitimate attack from President Clinton for failing to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union." -- Morton Kondracke, Washington Times, April 26, 1995.

"The cia itself did not make much difference in the ultimate outcome of the cold war. Its analysts misjudged almost every major development in the post-World War II world, including the most spectacular misjudgment of all -- the flat-out failure to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union." -- David Wise, Nightmover: How Aldrich Ames Sold the CIA to the KGB for $4.6 Million (1995).

"Has any government department goofed up more than the Central Intelligence Agency? ... Their most egregious and expensive blunder about the Soviet economy we are still paying for." -- Mary McGrory, Washington Post, March 14, 1995.

"Never has so much money been allocated to study one country; never have so many academic, and government specialists scrutinized every aspect of a country's life.... Yet when the end came, the experts found themselves utterly unprepared." -- Richard Pipes, Foreign Affairs (January/ February 1995).

"The CIA failed to alert the President and Congress about the inexorable Soviet collapse. The present DCI, in his starched white outfit wishing it all away, is in a curious state of institutional denial." -- William Safire, New York Times, April 6, 1995.

Almost everyone, it seems, knows that the Central Intelligence Agency failed to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the belief that the CIA somehow missed the single most important event of the twentieth century-pervades virtually all discussions of U.S. intelligence these days, and may, in fact, be one of the few Cold War events about which both liberals and conservatives agree.

This unanimity comes at an especially difficult time for the intelligence community. Under fire today for other shortcormings, including, notably, its handling of the Aldrich Ames case, the agency is struggling to explain and justify its mission in the post-Cold War era.

The perception of failure in the Soviet case has become a key piece of evidence in current debates over plans to reform the U.S. intelligence community, part of the rationale behind both the Commission on Intelligence Roles and Missions and the current organizational shakeup at the cia under its new director, John Deutch. Senator Moynihan regularly uses the CIA's supposed failure to predict the Soviet collapse as ammunition in his proposal for abolishing the agency and dispersing its various components among the Departments of State and Defense.

There is only one small problem: The critics are wrong. The intelligence community did not fail to predict the Soviet collapse. Quite the contrary, throughout the 1980s the intelligence community warned of the weakening Soviet economy, and, later, of the impending fall of Gorbachev and the breakup of the Soviet Union. Moreover, within the intelligence community the Cia was the most skeptical about the ability of Gorbachev to maintain control, and that skepticism grew greater the deeper one went into the Cia. Within the agency, the Office of Soviet Analysis (SOVA) was the most concerned about Gorbachev's future, and said so flatly.

Some intelligence officials and other political figures have tried to make this point, but so far they have largely been ignored. After the 1991 coup that ultimately finished Gorbachev and the USSR, the chairmen of the House and Senate oversight committees rejected charges that the intelligence community had failed to alert U.S. leaders. Shortly thereafter, Acting DCI Richard Kerr defended the CIA's record in a letter to the New York Times. Former DCI Robert Gates has also argued that U.S. intelligence charting the decline and fall of the Soviet Union was on the mark.(1) Why then has the myth persisted? One reason is that, until recently, the intelligence itself has not been publicly available, and, even when the relevant documents have been released, critics of the intelligence community have not bothered to read them.(2) Hard data have often been neglected for the sake of clever argument.

Another reason is that the intelligence community has indeed failed in other cases, and it is often easiest to paint with a broad brush. The most famous example is probably the intelligence community's failure to alert U.S. policymakers of the weakness of the Shah of Iran, the strength of his opponents, and, in particular, the support enjoyed by the Islamic fundamentalists. In that case, the evidence confirms that the failure occurred because the United States, in trying to maintain friendly relations with the Shah and the Iranian intelligence service, failed to develop independent sources of information within Iran.(3) The Soviet case looks like the Iranian case -- Uncle Sam betting on the wrong horse -- and so people have assumed that it is the same.

Finally, critics have been able to claim that there was an intelligence failure simply because the United States seemed to fail to achieve its objectives: establishing a long-term partnership with Gorbachev and preserving the integrity of the Soviet Union. U.S. policy was thwarted by the sudden coup that eventually led to Gorbachev's demise; therefore, goes the argument, U.S. intelligence must have failed. But, as we shall see, the intelligence community -- and the cia in particular -- performed well in anticipating the Soviet collapse. In some respects, its performance was exemplary.

Predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union involved three separate problems requiring analysis within progressively more restricted timeframes, and roughly analogous to those encountered in predicting whether an attack win be launched by a hostile power: a "strategic" problem, a "tactical" problem, and an "indications and warning" problem.

The "Strategic" Problem: Detecting

Soviet Decline

The failure of the Soviet economy and the unraveling of the Soviet social system were not as obvious as they may seem in retrospect. For much of the twentieth century, most experts in the West assumed that the Soviet system, though often brutal, was at least economically productive and politically stable.

Indeed, the Soviet economy did seem to work well during the 1950s and 1960s. The Soviet GNP grew at a rapid rate. In part, this growth reflected the fact that the Soviet Union was recovering from World War II, and in part that it was still in the initial phase of a newly industrializing economy, when growth rates are typically large. Moreover, the Soviet Union was very competitive in many areas of science and engineering (witness Sputnik), and was also able to sustain a tremendous military buildup. The Soviets, it seemed, were well on their way to building the industrial infrastructure that most Western thinkers believed was necessary for sustained economic growth.

True, the Soviets were behind almost everyone in producing quality consumer goods, but then so had the Japanese been in the mid-twentieth century. It is only in retrospect that mainstream opinion acknowledges that the Soviet heavy industry responsible for the apparent growth in GNP was inefficient, poorly planned, and, in many cases, environmentally disastrous. It is also important to remember that during the 1960s and 1970s many serious people actually debated the relative effectiveness of market economies and socialism. Thus, much of the problem of detecting the failure of the Soviet economy revolved around the difficulty of simply accepting the fact that such a failure was possible.

Even though there were debates during the 1970s over the size of the Soviet GNP and the size of the Soviet defense budget, the context was quite different from the debate that took place in the decade preceding the Soviet collapse. Intelligence analysts in the Defense Department argued during this earlier period that the Soviet defense budget and the Soviet share of GNP devoted to defense were both larger than that claimed by the CIA.(4) However, the point that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was trying to make at that time was not that the Soviet Union was being stressed, but rather that the Soviet Union was able to endure stress. DIA claimed that by underestimating Soviet military expenditures the cia was underestimating Soviet military capabilities and the Soviet determination to achieve military superiority.(5)

By the late 1970s, however, it was clear that, whatever the absolute size of the Soviet GNP and defense budget, the Soviet economy as a whole was faltering. The CIA and defense intelligence organizations continued to disagree on whether this would affect Soviet military spending -- the DIA insisted that it would not, even up to the point of Soviet collapse -- but there was general consensus across the intelligence community that a slowdown was occurring.

Indeed, the stultified, stalled-out condition of the Soviet economy was an accepted truth and was the "given" context in which the new regime of Mikhail Gorbachev was analyzed. For example, within eight months of Gorbachev's assuming office as General Secretary, the intelligence community issued a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the prospects for Gorbachev and the...