Long-standing Russian traditions compounded the geographic difficulties. Russians traditionally have been suspicious of foreigners. Before the reign of Peter the Great (1682- 1725), foreigners were often sequestered in special areas of the Russian capital, where they could be watched easily and their contact with Russians kept limited and controlled. Russians also have a tradition of obscuring the physical realities of the Russian state, which came to be known as
maskirovka,
whose roots go back to the tsars. The most famous instance of obscuring reality occurred during the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-1796). Her minister of war, Grigory Potemkin, built what appeared to be villages but, in reality, were merely facades to impress Catherine with the success of his policies. These
Potemkin villages
presaged
maskirovka.
As the scope of the cold war spread from the Soviet Union to Europe, Asia, and then all over the world, the field within which intelligence had to be collected and analyzed and within which operations might be required expanded as well. The bilateral cold war was, in intelligence terms, a global war.
For all of these reasons, but primarily because of the size and inaccessibility of the Soviet Union, the intelligence community developed technical means to collect the required intelligence remotely. The United States continued to pursue human intelligence operations, both in the Soviet Union and against Soviet diplomats posted around the world, but the technical collection disciplines (INTs) were relied upon most. The technical INTs can be applied to post-cold war issues with some adjustments, but they cannot be replaced en masse. In effect, some aspects of the collection system are a legacy that cannot simply be scrapped or easily modified. Ironically, the relative longevity of space-borne systems—usually far beyond their estimated endurance—that has been one of their major assets now becomes something of a liability. For reasons of budget alone no one would propose scrapping functioning but older systems in favor of more modern ones.
Again, the United States has important legacies with respect to the Soviet Union in terms of ongoing state-based issues. First, the states about which the United States is most concerned tend to be secretive or engage in political processes that are not transparent, such as China, Russia still, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and, to a lesser degree, Iran. Second, these states pose the same dilemma in terms of the limits of technical collection and the difficulty of human collection. Third, it is important to remember that the collection systems in orbit in 2008 were designed and launched either at the end of the cold war or in its immediate aftermath, when the nature of the post-cold war world left little guidance as to intelligence needs. So, to an extent the United States is still using a technical collection system built for the Soviet target, whose applicability to early twenty-first-century problems may be somewhat limited.
THE EMPHASIS ON SOVIET MILITARY CAPABILITIES
The predominant question within the Soviet issue was that of the nation’s military capabilities, which posed a threat to the United States and its allies.
Capabilities refer to the current forces or those being planned. The U.S. intelligence community sought information about the quantity and quality of Soviet armed forces across the board; the directions of Soviet military research and development and new capabilities the Soviets might be pursuing; the degree to which current and planned capabilities posed a threat to U.S. and allied interests; and the Soviet doctrine, that is, how the Soviets planned to employ forces in combat.
With the right collection systems, much of a potentially hostile nation state’s capabilities can be known. This is particularly true of deployed conventional and strategic forces, which are difficult to conceal, as they tend to exist in identifiable garrisons and must exercise from time to time. They also tend to be garrisoned or deployed in large numbers, which makes hiding them or masking them impractical at best. The regularity and precision that govern each nation’s military make it susceptible to intelligence collection. Forces tend to exercise in regular and predictable patterns, which also reveal how they are intended to be employed in combat. Research and development may be more difficult to track up to a point, but systems must be tested before they are deployed, again exposing them to collection. In other words, these military activities in any state tend to
self-reveal.
Research and development can be done secretly, in laboratories or remote sites, but eventually all weapons have to be tested—repeatedly—before they can be deployed.
Although the U.S. intelligence community made mistakes during the cold war, such as overestimating and underestimating missile forces, overall Soviet capabilities were fairly well known in detail. Some level of comfort may even have been derived from tracking these hard objects. As one senior military intelligence officer put it, “The Soviet Union was the enemy we came to know and love.” Some people dismissed the so-called
bean counting,
arguing that the military inventories were undertaken largely to justify bigger defense budgets. (“Bean counting” is a somewhat pejorative term that refers to intelligence products that tally up the number of forces, equipment, and manpower in foreign militaries. Although demanding and necessary, critics do not see these products as insightful or analytical.) The logic of this view was difficult to follow, because the intelligence community had little institutional interest in larger military forces. Within the national security sector of the budget, every dollar that went to defense was one dollar less that was available for intelligence, which was always funded at significantly lower levels than defense. intentions—the plans and goals of the adversary—are a more amorphous subject and pose a much more difficult collection problem. They need not be demonstrated, exercised, or exposed in advance, and they may not even be revealed by regular military exercises. Standoff or remote collection systems, which may be useful for collecting against capabilities, may reveal nothing about intentions. Signals intelligence may help reveal intentions, but this collection task may require espionage.
During the mid-1970s a
capabilities versus intentions
debate about the Soviet Union took place in the United States, largely among policy makers and influential individuals outside of government, but involving the intelligence community as well. U.S. intelligence was fairly well informed about Soviet military capabilities, but not Soviet intentions. The question was whether these intentions mattered. U.S. officials engaged in long and sometimes heated debates about whether the Soviet Union planned to conduct large-scale offensive conventional operations preemptively or at the outset of a war with NATO; whether it could carry out such operations from a standing start—that is, with forces already deployed and supplied—without bringing up telltale reserves and additional supplies, thus with little or no warning; and whether the Soviet Union thought a nuclear conflict was winnable.
Those who believed that intentions mattered argued that simply keeping track of the number of military forces was not enough to gauge the threat they posed. Only intentions made it possible to gauge the true level of threat. For example, Britain has a substantial nuclear force but is of no concern to the United States because the two nations are close allies. By taking into account Soviet intentions, the United States would have a much clearer picture of the true nature of Soviet policy, which was central to U.S. and Western security concerns. Proponents of this view believed that the Soviet threat was being underestimated because intentions were not a factor in national estimates.
Those who were less concerned about intentions argued that if one were aware of a certain level of hostility and also knew the adversary’s capabilities, then knowing specific intentions was not that important. They argued that a worst case based on capabilities could serve as a planning yardstick. Finally, intentions (that is, plans) may be changed at will, making them a highly elusive target. Differences over the importance of intentions led to the Team A-Team B competitive analysis. The Team A-Team B exercise arose from concerns by members of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) during the latter part of the Ford administration (1974-1977) about Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimates of Soviet programs. PFIAB members felt that the estimates emphasized the weapons programs and not the geopolitical strategy behind them. They convinced Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George Bush (1976-1977) to conduct a competitive analysis, with a group of outside experts (Team B) looking at the same intelligence as the government analysts (Team A). Such a competitive exercise had promise, but the results were undercut by the fact that Team B was made up entirely of hawks, experts who were highly suspicious of Soviet motives and of intelligence community analysis. Not surprisingly, Team B’s conclusions were much the same as the PFIAB concerns that prompted the study. The lack of balance in Team B diminished interest in doing this type of exercise in the future.
The track record for Soviet intentions is much less certain. The United States was never able to ascertain, for example, whether the Soviets subscribed to the nuclear doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD), which provided the basis for the size of U.S. strategic nuclear forces. The thinking behind MAD was that nuclear devastation was such an awe-some prospect that it made nuclear forces almost unusable, the two forces holding each other in check. The United States spent many negotiating rounds of the early strategic arms control talks proselytizing the Soviets on the importance of MAD. Did the Soviets agree at last or give lip service to the idea of MAD merely as a way to get on to negotiations? Did it matter? Similarly, did the Soviets think that nuclear war was winnable? Did they plan to invade Western Europe? Soviet doctrine certainly emphasized keeping war away from the homeland, but this is true of most nations’ doctrines.
Mirror imaging underlay some of the debate over Soviet intentions. Did U.S. analysts impose their own views of Soviet intentions in lieu of knowing them? Another question was the utility
of worst-case analysis.
Is it a useful analytical tool? For defense planners, the answer is yes. If they are going to commit forces to combat, they need to be able to gauge the worst level of threat they are likely to face. For other planners and analysts, the worst case may be an overestimate that is much less useful.
Finally, some people question whether the intelligence products themselves affected the intelligence process. Each year the intelligence community completed a national estimate on Soviet strategic military capabilities (NIE 11-3-8). U.S. policy makers viewed this estimate as necessary for strategic planning, including preparation of forces and budgets. But did the preparation of an annual major estimate also affect intelligence? Did it lock intelligence into set patterns, making it more difficult for the community to effect major changes or shifts in analyses? In other words, once the community had produced an NIE 11-3-8 for several years, how easy was it for analysts to propose dissenting, iconoclastic, or wholly new views? One remedy for these possible flaws was competitive analysis, tried most prominently in the Team A-Team B exercise.
Direct comparison of forces, a legitimate intelligence activity, often took place in a politicized atmosphere. Policy makers in successive administrations and Congresses tended to have preconceptions about the nature of the Soviet threat and thus viewed intelligence as being either supportive or mistaken. They engaged in long debates about quality (a U.S. advantage) versus quantity (a Soviet advantage) of weapons systems. The inconclusive nature of the debates led many to seek other means of comparison. One means was defense spending, both in direct costs and in the percentage of gross domestic product devoted to defense, which were taken as signs of intentions as well as capabilities.
THE EMPHASIS ON STATISTICAL INTELLIGENCE
Much of the intelligence that was produced (as opposed to collected) about the Soviet Union was statistical, including
• The size of Soviet and Soviet-satellite forces in terms of manpower and all levels of weaponry
• The size of the Soviet economy and its output
• The amount and percentage of the Soviet economy devoted to defense
• A variety of demographics about life in the Soviet Union
Not all areas of inquiry were equally successful. The capabilities of the Soviet military were tracked quite well. Analysis of the Soviet economy was less successful. Ultimately, the intelligence community both overestimated the size of the Soviet economy and underestimated that portion of it devoted to defense, which probably totaled 40 percent of gross domestic product annually—a staggering level. Demographic data in the late 1980s and early 1990s pointed to a steady decline in the quality of Soviet life.
As important as the data were, the overall effort to quantify aspects of the Soviet issue had an effect of its own. Although much about this issue remained intangible, the intelligence community emphasized its ability to track various attributes in detail.
Looking back, one finds some efforts a bit comical. For example, the U.S. intelligence community devoted a great deal of time and energy—perhaps too much—to various means of comparing Soviet defense spending with that of the United States. Some analysts converted the cost of U.S. defense into rubles; others converted assessed values for the Soviet defense establishment into dollars. Each of these methodologies was artificial, and their respective proponents usually ended up preaching to the converted or to the stubbornly unbelieving regarding the Soviet threat.