in weighing the international balance, was working against the interests of Moscow and that the U.S. government was in the hands of a dangerous anti-Soviet crowd. The Kremlin seemed to have good intelligence on its American problem.
The events of 1983 pointed to a renewal of the Cold War, which made the role of intelligence analysis at the Agency more immediate and controversial. President Reagan began to refer to the Soviet Union as the “focus of evil in the world” and an “evil empire.” The new Soviet general secretary, Yuri Andropov, the former chief of the KGB, suggested that President Reagan was insane and a liar. U.S. media paid close attention to Reagan’s sensational charges, and Soviet media launched a verbal offensive that matched Reagan’s rhetoric. Reagan was compared to Hitler and accused of “fanning the flames of war.” Andropov was portrayed in the U.S. press as a Red Darth Vadar. Reagan’s demonization of several Soviet leaders was counter-productive; the same could be said for Obama’s demonization of Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation at the time of this writing.
European media were declaring the resumption of the Cold War, comparing the crisis in the early 1980s to the Berlin blockade in 1948 and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. These were exaggerations, but any level of tension in relations between Moscow and Washington created reminders of previous confrontations. Soviet-American détente and arms control were pushed to the background, and the possibilities of superpower conflict to the foreground.
The public’s reaction in 1983 would have been more tense if it had shared Soviet knowledge of aggressive U.S. military exercises and intelligence activities. The Reagan administration authorized unusually aggressive military exercises near the Soviet border that, in some cases, violated Soviet territorial sovereignty. American, European, and Soviet publics had no knowledge of the “war scare” in the Kremlin, particularly Operation RYAN, a sensitive KGB collection operation launched to determine whether the United States was planning a surprise nuclear attack.
One of the great mutual misunderstandings between the Soviet Union and the United States was that both sides feared surprise attack. The United States suffered psychologically from the Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, and it has still not recovered from 9/11. At the same time, the United States has never appreciated that Moscow has similar fears due to Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion in the same year as Pearl Harbor, a far more devastating assault.
One of the great ironies of WWII is that the United States and the Soviet Union both suffered from surprise attack, although both had the intelligence capacity to limit, if not prevent, the attacks. The intelligence failures contributed to the national traumas caused by these attacks, which marked the worst military disasters in their history. U.S. leaders should be more aware of the impact of this trauma on their Russian counterparts. This was not the case for President Reagan, who issued a radio warning into an open mic in August 1984 that “I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” Those of us in the intelligence community who understood the importance of de-escalating the possibility of war with the Russians weren’t amused.
Russia’s fear of surprise attack was accentuated in 1983, when the Reagan administration deployed the Army’s Pershing-II missile and land-based cruise missiles in Europe as a counter to the Soviet Union’s SS-20 missiles. The SS-20 was not considered a “strategic” weapon because of its limited range—3,000 miles, well short of the United States. The P-II, however, could not only reach the Soviet Union, but could destroy Moscow’s command and control systems. Since the Soviets would have limited warning time—less than five minutes—the P-II was viewed as a first-strike weapon that could destroy the Soviet early warning system. I asked Undersecretary of Defense Lynn Davis whether anyone in the Pentagon thought of the P-II as a first-strike weapon, and she appeared nonplussed. Currently, U.S. policymakers fail to understand Moscow’s legitimate concerns with the deployment of a regional missile defense in Poland and Romania.
In addition to the huge strategic advantage from the P-II and numerous cruise missiles, the U.S. deployment of the MX missile and the D-5 Trident submarine placed the Soviets in an inferior position with regard to strategic modernization. Overall, the United States held an advantage in political, economic, and military resources. The United States and NATO presently have significant advantages over Russia, which makes the current exaggeration of the threat particularly odious.
President Reagan authorized a high-risk psychological warfare program to intimidate the Kremlin, including dangerous probes of Soviet borders by the U.S. Navy and Air Force. These activities were unknown to intelligence analysts at the CIA. In fact, very few U.S. officials at the White House or the Pentagon were fully briefed on these measures. These risky operations included sending strategic bombers over the North Pole to test Soviet radar, as well as conducting exercises in maritime approaches to the Soviet Union where U.S. warships had never previously ventured. There were secret operations that simulated surprise naval air attacks on Soviet targets. Operation RYAN was a response to the detected aspects of the U.S. psychological warfare campaign, which began several months after President Reagan was inaugurated.
The CIA was at a disadvantage in trying to analyze the war scare, because a major flaw in the intelligence process is the unwillingness of the Pentagon to share U.S. military maneuvers and weapons deployments with the CIA. The CIA was slow to anticipate Soviet military maneuvers in the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean because there was no awareness of U.S. deployments of strategic submarines in those waters, which led to a Soviet response. In 1983, the CIA had no idea that the Pentagon’s annual Able Archer military exercise would be conducted in a provocative fashion with high-level participation. The exercise was a test of U.S. command and communications procedures, including procedures for the release and use of nuclear weapons in case of war.
The intelligence community was unwitting of these provocative exercises, and the CIA regularly turned out National Intelligence Estimates that assessed indications of an “abnormal Soviet fear of conflict with the United States.” The national intelligence officer for Soviet strategic weapons, Larry Gershwin, believed that any notion of a Soviet fear of an American attack was risible, but six years later the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board concluded that there had been a “serious concern” in the Kremlin over a possible U.S. attack. I believed that Soviet fears were genuine at the time, and President Reagan’s national security advisor, Robert McFarlane, remarked, “We got their attention” but “maybe we overdid it.” At the time of this writing in 2016, Gershwin, who manipulated intelligence on strategic matters throughout the 1980s, is still at the CIA as a national intelligence officer. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
INTELLIGENCE LESSONS LEARNED
It would be wonderful if intelligence could predict the future, but it can’t. Good intelligence should at least be able to create the possibility of better, more effective national defense, but that is similarly uncertain. In 1972, with the benefit of excellent clandestine sources, I learned that Egyptian president Anwar Sadat had decided to expel the Soviet military presence from his country, because he had concluded (correctly) that Moscow would never take military risks to challenge the Israeli occupation of Egyptian territory. But it was also likely that the ouster of the Soviet advisors was designed to attract the attention of the United States and provide an opening for pressure from Washington on Israel to get serious about direct talks with Cairo over the Israeli occupation. Kissinger called Director Helms to thank him for premonitory intelligence that he did not acquire from the media. I received a call from Helms’s office thanking me for the assessment and noting that it was well received in the White House. But it did not lead to any policy considerations of a new diplomatic opening in the Middle East that could have advanced the cause of peace and stability.
In a rare passage in his memoir, Kissinger conceded that the national security advisor first turns to the CIA for the “facts in a crisis and for analysis of events.” He was particularly complimentary toward Helms for “never misusing his intelligence or his power.” Helms knew that his integrity guaranteed his effectiveness, that his best weapon with presidents was a reputation for reliability.
The sad fact is that accurate intelligence is no assurance of effective national security policy, but intelligence