The CIA vindicated: the Soviet collapse was predicted

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

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)