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CIA's Analysis of the Soviet Union, 1947-1991
March 9-10, 2001
Center of International Studies at Princeton University
On March 9-10, the Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) and the Center of International Studies at Princeton University co-hosted a conference at Princeton that examined the Agency’s analysis of the Soviet Union from 1947 through 1991. The 250 participants at the conference attended scholarly panels—consisting of prominent policymakers, practitioners, and academics—to discuss the impact of CIA’s analysis on US foreign and national security policymaking from the beginning to the end of the Cold War.
Addressing the panelists and the media the evening before the conference officially kicked off, DCI Tenet observed, "Keeping the Cold War from becoming a hot one was the overriding goal of US Intelligence and American national security policy for over four decades. An intelligence effort of such magnitude and fraught with such great risk and uncertainty was bound to have its flaws and failures, both operational and analytical. I believe, however, that the overall record is one of impressive accomplishment." Tenet provided specific examples of how Agency analysis informed and influenced strategic decisionmaking on such issues as the Krasnoyarsk radar, the Strategic Defense Initiative, Gorbachev’s economic agenda, ethnic separatism, and arms control agreements.
DDCI John McLaughlin, who led the Agency’s analysis of Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union, concentrated on Agency post-Cold War analytic efforts. "What we didn’t know then about the Soviet Union is different in so many ways from what we don’t know now about Russia… With the demise of the Soviet Union, the nature of our analytic questions changed. Before, threats emanated from Soviet strengths. Now, dangers stem largely from Russia’s weaknesses or simply from the uncertainties associated with its transformation." Fundamental changes in the structure of the economy, government, and society have made for major challenges to the Russia analytical cadre, which also experienced dramatic downsizing in the 1990s. Moreover, "the list of issues Director Tenet must discuss in the threat assessment he delivers annually to Congress grows longer and more complex each year. Those thirsting for the clarity of the Soviet period may have to live with the likelihood that what we see is what we may continue to get for a long time: a kaleidoscopic world of rapidly shifting, interconnected problems—The kind of world that presents the toughest challenge to an analyst trying to help decisionmakers minimize the risk of strategic surprise."
As part of the conference, the DA/Office of Information Management (OIM) released more than 850 declassified documents—more than 19,000 pages—related to CIA’s analysis of the Soviet Union, covering Soviet policy, economic growth, political developments, scientific progress, and military readiness. According to Bob Leggett, Program Manager for the OIM declassification effort, and Gerald Haines, CIA’s Chief Historian, co-authors of the conference volume, "The collection of documents declassified for the conference represents a sample large enough and sufficiently diverse to ensure that most of the major developments and analytical issues were covered, and the tenor and substance of the DI’s analysis was captured." DCI Tenet noted at the conference that this release, combined with the 2,700 CIA analytic products and NIEs on the USSR that were previously declassified, "constitute the largest trove of intelligence analysis on any single country ever released by any nation... No other nation’s foreign intelligence agency has voluntarily released as much information about its past as has the Central Intelligence Agency and we will continue to build upon that achievement in the years ahead." D/OIM Ed Cohen told media representatives that the Agency plans to continue to release historical intelligence documents under the Agency’s voluntary historical release programs. According to DCI Tenet, the Agency will do so "because US intelligence is a servant of America’s democratic system" and "because the men and women of US intelligence are proud of the contributions they made to defending the security of the Free World during the Cold War." The documents are available on the Internet at www.foia.cia.gov
Each panel discussed papers distributed before the conference. An initial panel discussed Agency Historian Don Steury’s paper on the origins of the Agency’s analysis of the Soviet Union. Panelists included former US Ambassador to the USSR Jack Matlock, former and serving Agency officers, and Professor Melvyn Leffler of UVA. A second panel explored Assessing Soviet Economic Performance. Former Ambassador to Bulgaria Raymond Garthoff authored a paper on Estimating Soviet Military Intentions and Capabilities; comments were offered by professors from Princeton, Columbia, and Harvard, and former DDI Doug MacEachin. Duke University Professor Vladimir Treml’s paper on Western Analysis and the Soviet Policymaking Process was commented on by Cambridge University’s Christopher Andrew, retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, Sergo Mikoyan, and UVA Professor Timothy Naftali. Following a keynote address by former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, a roundtable consisting of Harvard Professor Ernest May, former DDCI Richard Kerr, former DCI James Schlesinger, and Agency historian Gerald Haines discussed How Influential Was CIA’s Analysis?
This was the third recent conference that CSI has sponsored on the Cold War. The others were held at the George Bush School for Presidential Studies at Texas A&M University in November 1999 and in Berlin in September 1999.
D/CSI Lloyd Salvetti said that beyond "CIA collaborating with Princeton University on a substantive conference that communicated the quality and scale of CIA’s analysis, the conference served to underscore to participating academics, policy makers, and the media aspects of the craft of analysis. Participants came away from Princeton with high regard for the contribution made by CIA’s analysts on the political, economic, military, and S&T issues of the Cold War. I am very much convinced we have helped refocus the discussion on CIA’s role in the Cold War to one more nuanced and balanced. We have never claimed to bat 1.000, but I think a fair-minded person would say we were in the high .400’s. As Bob Gates said in the introduction to our volume issued with the conference entitled: CIA’s Analysis of the Soviet Union, 1947-1991, ‘I have always believed that the record of actual intelligence assessments represents the best defense of CIA’s and the Intelligence Community’s analytical performance vis-a`-vis the USSR - the good, the bad and the ugly.’"
The conference volume produced by CSI contains the key judgments or summaries of 50 of the documents deemed most significant by the author of each panel’s paper. Download a copy from INTELINK at http://www.cia.gov/csi/books/princeton/index.html.