The CIA vindicated: the Soviet collapse was predicted

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

* Predicted, however, that the long-term prospects of a coup were not good, that events in the USSR were being driven by tidal forces. The wave of nationalism and decay of public support for the Bolshevik regime could not be reversed; a coup would not alleviate the economic failure that was in large part responsible for events. Even if hardliners did manage to seize power temporarily, they would not be able to consolidate control.

In addition, the intelligence analysis laid down markers -- that is, it presented facts that a reader would have to refute in order to reject the analysis presented in the assessment. For example, "The Soviet Cauldron" noted four months before the August coup attempt that:

* Hardliners had raised the possibility of using the military to restore order in public statements;

* Military officers inclined to support democratization had been moved out of important posts or retired; and

* The military and security organizations had demonstrated the logistics and capability of moving large numbers of troops into Moscow on short notice and establishing a command structure to control them.

In order to believe that the hardliners would not launch a coup, therefore, one would need to explain why they would have taken such potentially risky or costly steps.

Although the record shows that the intelligence community was aware of the untenable situation in the Soviet Union and gave ample warning that Gorbachev was in jeopardy, former high-level U.S. officials disagree as to how aware they were of these warnings. Some officials at the middle levels of the National Security Council, such as Rice, knew of both the range of opinion within the intelligence community and the degree to which they agreed Gorbachev was in trouble. Other officials we interviewed who had less routine contact with intelligence analysts tracking the political situation in the Soviet Union were not aware of these differences, nor that the Cia had an especially pessimistic assessment of Gorbachev's prospects.

At the highest levels, Brent Scowcroft, President Bush's national security advisor, does not recall receiving warning that was sufficiently precise to support action on the part of the United States. He believes that, if such warnings were given, they were "lost in the fog' of the volume on information that passed by on a daily basis.17 However, Gates recalls differently, and cites three separate events that would indicate these warnings reached their target.

The establishment of the "contingency planning group" was one. The second, according to Gates, was a memo he sent personally to President Bush in the summer of 1990 citing the cia's warnings of the deteriorating Soviet political situation; Gates described Gorbachev as the "Soviet Moses" -- that is, the leader who would take the Soviet people to the promised land, but would not himself survive the Exodus. The final indicator was another memo that summer in which, Gates maintains, he told Bush that the United States should "stop knocking Yeltsin" because we "would eventually be facing him on the other side of the table." All of these actions, Gates asserts, were taken in light of the cia's briefings and reports.