The CIA vindicated: the Soviet collapse was predicted

National Interest, The, Fall, 1995 by Bruce D. Berkowitz, Jeffrey T. Richelson

"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.