Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [174]
• Strength of U.S. allies or surrogates
• Signs of relative Soviet strength or weakness (signs of the contradictions predicted by Kennan)
This is a long list and an ironic reflection of Sherman Kent’s desire to know everything. In terms of intelligence operations, containment required• An ability to collect intelligence on the Soviet target to enable analysts to fulfill their requirements
• An operational ability to help blunt Soviet expansion
• An ability to weaken the Soviet Union and its allies and surrogates
• A counterintelligence capability to deal with Soviet espionage and possible subversion
• A wealth of information on Soviet military capabilities both to support the development of appropriate U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) defenses and to help target Soviet forces and facilities in the event of war
Neither set of tasks, analytical nor operational, arrived full-blown with the acceptance of the containment policy. Both sets evolved over time as the United States dealt with the Soviet problem.
THE DIFFICULTY OF THE SOVIET TARGET. The Soviet Union was a uniquely difficult target for intelligence collection and analysis. First, it was a very large nation (spread over two continents) with a remote interior, providing the Soviet leaders with a vast amount of space in which to hide capabilities they preferred to keep secret. Moreover, large portions of the Soviet Union were subject to adverse weather conditions that impeded overhead collection. Second, it was a closed and heavily policed society, which meant that large areas of the Soviet state—even in its more developed regions—were inaccessible to foreigners, even to diplomats legally posted to the Soviet Union.
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,