The arrogance of the clerks

National Review, Nov 4, 1991 by Angelo Codevilla

Bill Casey was uncomfortable both with the conclusion and with the craftsmanship. As a result, two years later (April 23, 1985) CIA wrote a paper "setting forth the basis for believing the Soviets might have been involved." The paper presents no independent factual evidence, only generalizations about Soviet behavior. Even this was still too much for some analysts, who, on May 20, wrote "the case against." It begins by protesting the fact that a "case for" had been written at all. Amusingly, it chides the paper Casey commissioned for being "conjectural," but makes it own case with such hard stuff as, "If in the unlikely event that the KGB instructed [the Bulgarians] to kill the Pope, there would have been greater attention paid to operational tradecraft."

Where does the truth lie? After the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the German government captured scores of terrorists who had been headquartered in East Germany. The Czechoslovak government shut down terrorist training facilities. As a result, the level of terrorism in Western Europe has dropped dramatically. As for the Pope plot, in 1990 a Soviet defector told a press conference that in 1980 the KGB had commissioned a study on how best to physically approach John Paul II.

The point here is not so much that they were so adamantly attached to the Soviets' innocence that, as far as they were concerned, any of their colleagues who thought otherwise had no right to say so. Even less did they have the right to apply the CIA cachet to such statements. Let us be clear: Such an attitude can only come from the belief that the right to speak on certain matters belongs only to the politically and socially correct.

Now let us turn to CIA's treatment of the Soviet Union. The CIA line has always been consistent with that of the best and the brightest in academe. Communism had lifted Russia out of poverty and into the top rank of industrial nations. Soviet prosperity was spartan but well distributed. A first-class public-health system served a population deeply in love with socialist security. Hence, the Soviet Union was politically solid, and President Reagan's talk about doing away with Communism was right-wing lunacy. Soviet military spending, like American military spending, took up about 6 per cent of GNP, but of a GNP roughly half that of the United States. Above all, the USSR would not violate arms-control agreements and would surely not equip itself to fight and win a nuclear war. Nevertheless, regardless of cost, the USSR could be counted on to rebuild its entire nuclear arsenal to beat an American anti-missile defense. Any American who thought otherwise was a warmonger.

CIA held this line despite massive contrary evidence. There was never a shortage of refugees and emigre who painted the pictures of Soviet squalor that today are accepted uncritically, nor a shortage of eloquent voices (e.g., Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) that said the regime was universally regarded as a monstrosity, and that it would collapse if ever people spoke the truth to one another. Nor was there a shortage of economists (one thinks of Henry Rowen and Charles Wolf) who were arguing that the Soviet GNP was less than a third of America's and that (William T. Lee and Steven Rosenfielde) over 25 per cent of it was devoted to the military. There was even a team, chosen by the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and headed by Richard Pipes, that gave detailed evidence of how the arsenal the Soviets had impoverished themselves to build was designed to fight, survive, and win a nuclear war.