which were invaluable during the missile crisis.
Similarly, National Security Advisor Kissinger had access to important intelligence when he was in Moscow to arrange a ceasefire in the Middle East during the October War. The CIA kept Kissinger apprised of Israeli ceasefire violations, which allowed him to press Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan to honor the ceasefire. Kissinger used a provocative nuclear alert to intimidate the Soviets during the war, which intelligence couldn’t support; he threatened the Israelis with unilateral intervention if the ceasefire was not honored, which intelligence did support.
In addition to having intelligence collection that was good enough to anticipate the Egyptian-Syrian attack in October 1973 and to track early Arab successes, the CIA knew that Egyptian President Sadat had decided to expel Soviet military advisors. In July 1972, the Egyptian analyst Gordon Sund and I were the first analysts in the intelligence community to report President Sadat’s decision to expel Soviet military technicians. In the wake of the summit meeting between Presidents Brezhnev and Nixon in May 1972, Sadat became convinced the Soviets would never lean on the United States to arrange an Israeli return of the occupied Sinai Peninsula.
Following our article on the likely ouster of the Soviets, Sund and I received phone calls from the deputy director for Intelligence, Sayre Stevens, saying that Kissinger had called CIA director Helms to say that it was “gratifying to learn about an important development from a CIA publication and not from the New York Times.” Sadat hoped the ouster of the Soviets would attract U.S. support for resuming the peace process, believing that Moscow was no longer a factor in the Middle East. Kissinger ignored the signal and, in his memoirs, falsely claims that Sadat’s “decision came as a complete surprise to Washington.”19 Kissinger conceded that he was “handicapped by my underestimating of the Egyptian president,” but he offered no explanation for failing to respond to Sadat’s “bombshell,” which could have prevented the war that began 15 months later. The CIA had provided premonitory intelligence, but Kissinger chose not to pay attention.
More importantly, Kissinger misused the intelligence that was available during the October War to declare an unjustified nuclear alert, a provocation that could have had terrible consequences. Kissinger declared Defense Condition III (DefCon-III) at a meeting of the National Security Council that he chaired late in the evening of October 24, 1973, arguing that the Soviets had sent nuclear materials through the Dardanelles and that General Secretary Brezhnev was prepared to intervene unilaterally due to Israeli violations of the ceasefire.
Neither assumption was valid. The intelligence system that tracked nuclear materials in the Dardanelles was a famously inaccurate system with numerous false positives, and the actual intelligence reading that Kissinger cited took place two weeks earlier. The note from Brezhnev to President Nixon was in fact a plea to the United States to rein in Israeli forces and return to the ceasefire that the United States and the Soviet Union had endorsed several days earlier.
Kissinger was the only principal at the National Security Council meeting who believed there was any likelihood of a Soviet intervention in the Middle East, and that a military alert involving nuclear systems was necessary. I spoke to other participants at the meeting, Secretary of Defense Schlesinger, CIA Director Colby, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Thomas Moorer, who considered DefCon-III risky and unnecessary. I served on the CIA task force at the time, and there was no intelligence that pointed to Soviet preparedness to intervene; there was no preparation of the air transport fleet; no resumption of an airlift of military equipment; no introduction of airborne forces. I argued at the time that the Soviets were not able to introduce forces at crucial points during previous Arab-Israeli confrontations in 1956 and 1967 because the Israeli Air Force had destroyed Egyptian air bases. The Soviets, moreover, had never used their airborne forces in a combat situation, and intelligence indicators showed they weren’t preparing to do so this time. By late October 1973, the Israelis had once again destroyed Egyptian air bases.
At an academic conference 25 years later, chaired by Ambassador Richard Parker, I repeated these charges against Kissinger and received support from former secretary of defense Schlesinger, who participated in the roundtable discussion. Interestingly, one of Kissinger’s most active acolytes, Peter Rodman, challenged my arguments and added that the United States “would have and should have been willing to go to war to prevent” Soviet military intervention. Rodman was still unwilling to concede that there was no intelligence evidence of such intervention.20
Although the CIA’s Middle East analysts missed the October War of 1973, they understood the threat of Palestinian terrorism, particularly the threat to Jordan’s King Hussein; the foolhardiness of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982; and the callous disregard for the safety of U.S. Marines who were dispatched to Lebanon in 1983 without proper rules of engagement. These are examples of the CIA being more alert than the community of policymakers, who were insufficiently responsive to intelligence alerts.
The combination of the policy failure in not exploiting President Sadat’s ouster of the Soviets in 1972 and the intelligence failure in not anticipating the surprise invasion led to an unnecessary setback for the policy of détente with the Soviet Union. The combination of a threat to Israel and Kissinger’s trumped-up notion of a Soviet threat to intervene unilaterally in the Middle East, possibly with nuclear weapons, led the right wing to renew its attacks on arms control and détente with Moscow and caused the liberal supporters of détente to reverse their position due to concern over a Soviet threat to Israel. The current Russian-American confrontation over Syria is having similar consequences, with a renewed call for more active opposition to Moscow’s maneuvers.
Neoconservatives and the right-wing community in the United States have been traditionally hostile to CIA intelligence, often charging that CIA analysts are apologists for Russian or Chinese behavior. They totally dismissed the CIA’s success in refuting the so-called “gaps” in Soviet-American weaponry and exposing the myth of Soviet military superiority. Starting with the non-existent bomber gap of the 1950s, the CIA convinced President Eisenhower that the true gap was Moscow’s significant inferiority in air power. The missile gap was a fiction of the 1960 presidential contest between Kennedy and Nixon, with the Democratic candidate fabricating the notion of a U.S. lag in missile capability. Again, the true situation was Soviet inferiority, but Kennedy was having too much success in the campaign with the charge of a missile gap and refused to correct his accusations.
There were other gaps that the CIA challenged, particularly the so-called intentions gap that was floated by Harvard Professor Richard Pipes in the early 1980s, when he argued speciously and even risibly that the Soviets believed they could fight and win a nuclear war. Charges of a gap between the anti-ballistic missile stocks of the two sides were pure fiction. Nevertheless, Deputy Director Gates gave public speeches that distorted the message of his own Intelligence Directorate and even supported the phony charge of a civil defense gap.
Another phony gap that the CIA contributed to was the charge of a “relentless Soviet buildup” in strategic forces, even though military intelligence was more exaggerated than CIA assessments. The CIA overestimated the growth of Soviet defense spending throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, and it took several years for the CIA’s military analysts to convince Gates that the Congress had to be informed of the errors in earlier briefings. There were no increases in Soviet military procurement or investment, which were the most important indexes. It was not until 1983 that we were able to inform Congress that the “Soviets did not field weapons as rapidly after 1976 as before. Practically all major categories of Soviet weapons were affected—missiles, aircraft, and ships.”21
In addition to the neoconservative critics of Nixon’s policy of détente, there were liberals such as Senators Moynihan and Henry Jackson (D-WA) who joined with labor leaders such as George Meany and Lane Kirkland to malign the policy of détente. As a result, key players in the Ford administration, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, successfully maneuvered against Kissinger and his policy of détente and made a special effort to toughen the CIA’s assessments on the Soviet Union.
In order to sabotage arms control, particularly the SALT agreement of 1972, Cheney and Rumsfeld convinced President Ford to weaken Kissinger’s influence by ending his dual role as secretary of state and national security advisor,