Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [180]
Whether the so-called Reagan Doctrine—a U.S. effort to aid anti-Soviet guerrillas—had any effect on Soviet thinking also remains unknown. The effort to aid the contras in Nicaragua became a political liability for the Reagan administration. But aid to the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan and the stalemate of that war shook the Soviet leaders. They were unable to win a war just over their border. Soviet military prowess was meaningless. Some analysts believe that a rift developed between the General Staff in Moscow and the “Afgantsy”—Soviet field commanders in the war, many of whom rallied to Boris N. Yeltsin in August 1991, when opponents of radical reform attempted to overthrow Gorbachev.
Gorbachev clearly thought that the price of empire was too high, overseas and even in Eastern Europe. What neither Western analysts nor Gorbachev himself understood was that piecemeal liquidation of these problems could not save the Soviet state.
INTELLIGENCE AND THE SOVIET PROBLEM
No U.S. intelligence estimate boldly predicted the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union and its dissolution into several independent republics. U.S. intelligence assumed that the Soviet state would go on, perhaps ever weaker but still intact. At the same time, the community produced numerous reports about how inefficient, weak, and unsustainable (over some unknown period of time) the Soviet Union was.
Two key questions need to be answered: Should intelligence have done better? Did intelligence matter for the United States in its final cold war victory?
Those who argue that intelligence should have done better do so on the grounds that the Soviet Union was the central focus of U.S. intelligence and that all of the expertise and spending over five decades should have provided greater insight into the true state of affairs. But a large gap exists between knowing that a state has fundamental weaknesses and fore-seeing its collapse. To a large extent, the collapse of the Soviet Union was unprecedented. (In the past, some once-great empires, such as the Ottoman Empire, had suffered long, lingering demises. Other great empires had suffered sudden collapses, but usually in the context of war, as did the German, Austrian, and Russian empires after World War I.) Nor was there anything in Soviet behavior—which had shown its brutal side often enough—to lead analysts to expect that the nation’s elite would acquiesce to its own fall from power without a struggle. An irony of history is that an attempt by the so-called power ministries of the Soviet state (the military, the defense industrial complex, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (KGB)—the State Security Committee—to derail Gorbachev revealed how little support the Soviet system had. (Rumors persist that Gorbachev knew about the coup or abetted it as a means of isolating his opposition.)
The debate about the performance of U.S. intelligence in the final stages of the cold war continues. Perhaps some analyst should have made the leap from the mountain of anecdotal evidence to a better picture of the true state of Soviet staying power. But much that happened from 1989 to 1991 was unknowable, both to U.S. analysts and to those taking part in the events.
How can the role of intelligence be assessed overall on the Soviet problem? In collection, U.S. intelligence performed some remarkable feats, finding sophisticated technical solutions to the problems posed by the remote and closed Soviet target. In analysis, U.S. intelligence accurately tracked Soviet military numbers and capabilities. This was important not only on a day-to-day basis but also during periods of intense confrontation, such as in Cuba in 1962, when President John F. Kennedy acted confidently because he knew a great deal about the true state of the U.S.-Soviet military balance.