Earnest will open door to espionage; E. Peter Earnest hopes the soon-to-be-open International Spy Museum will educate others about the importance of intelligence-gathering to the security of the United States

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 24, 2002 | by Stephen Goode

Human intelligence [HUMINT] still is probably the only way to get at people's plans and intentions. And it is human intelligence that is largely the focus of the museum. ISM is very much about human spies and their roles in history.

Insight: How did you happen to become involved in intelligence?

EPE: My fiancee worked for an office at the CIA. Back in the early 1950s, we didn't know much about the CIA, it was quite mysterious, but the people that she worked for approached me through her. Would I be interested in joining? I knew it had to do with foreign affairs. I related it to the Cold War and, like many younger folks at the time, the Soviet Union and the threat of communism were very, very much on our minds.

Sometimes people today hear the words "Red Scare" and think it was one summer of discomfiture, or even that it involved smearing people in Hollywood. But it was a very real threat and it continued for some decades. I was concerned, so I indicated interest and went into the agency in 1957.

I worked on anti-Party [Communist] operations. For many years I worked on operations involving the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, both running agents there and attempting to recruit agents inside [the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe].

Insight: In your experience over there, did it ever occur to you that the Soviet Union would collapse as rapidly as it did?

EPE: No. It didn't because I had lived with it for so long. You just didn't have any perception of either the Soviet Union as an empire dissolving or communism as a major force in the clash of world ideologies going down so fast.

Sometimes people speak of the general failure to predict the fall of the Soviet Union and of communism as an intelligence failure. The estimates show otherwise. I think the agency now has released all of its estimates dealing with military and economic aspects of the Soviet Union in the 10-year period before the collapse. My sense is that most objective observers now believe the U.S. intelligence community was right when it came to Soviet military capabilities. Indeed, in many cases, in matters relating to some of the SALT [Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty] and disarmament talks, for instance, the Soviet negotiators accepted our figures because they were more reliable than the Soviet figures, which in some cases were outfight wrong or they were cooked--deliberately distorted either through wishful thinking or as scare tactics.

In terms of Soviet economics, if you go back and look at those analyses, you will see they increasingly depict a Soviet Union that could not continue. For one thing, the economy no longer could sustain the military machine. It was never a robust economy and it kept getting worse and worse. How long could that continue?

True, so far as I know, no one called the precise date on which it all would fall apart, but I don't consider that particularly relevant. When you're dealing with the fall of an empire, you're looking at the major trend lines. Nobody had a better insight into the Soviet Union than the KGB itself. They didn't call the precise date, either.