Spycraft - Melton [33]
Pictures neither lie nor reveal the complete story. With the early successes of the photoreconnaissance satellites, American leadership also desperatelyneeded to know more about what Soviet leaders were thinking and planning. At no time was this more publicly apparent than during the 1960 U.S. presidential election.
Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kennedy charged that Republicans were insufficiently attentive to national defense. How could the Republican administration, asked the Democrats, have allowed the United States to fall so woefully behind in this critical area? Backed by imprecise Pentagon estimates and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s tough talk, the issue touched a nerve with American voters. Eisenhower, of course, was basing his moderate Soviet policy on secret U-2 photographs, which would support his position, if made public. The U-2 photographs appeared to provide convincing rebuttal to the argument that the Republicans were weak on national defense, but without credible corroboration, their interpretation was hotly debated. National Intelligence Estimates of Soviet missiles showed an alarming increase in capability and numbers, with the U.S. lagging behind. 20 The phrase “missile gap” entered the national vocabulary.
What the American public heard were Khrushchev’s exaggerated claims and Kennedy’s allegations against the Republicans. Two years later, intelligence provided by Penkovsky, combined with satellite photographs, prompted a downward revision of the official estimate of Soviet missiles during Kennedy’s presidency.21
Knowing Soviet capabilities with certainty was impossible. A totalitarian state such as the USSR possessed a large advantage over an open society in its centralized control of media and citizens. Within the Soviet Union, even road maps and railroad schedules were routinely falsified. Conversely, in any edition, The New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal provided more reliable accounts for the Soviets on the thoughts and motives of the American leadership than U.S. intelligence could tell the American President about events within the Soviet Union. Farm reports, stock prices, economic statistics, and dozens of other sources of information, freely and widely available in the United States, revealed data that the USSR either held as a state secret or purposely distorted.
The Iron Curtain was a geopolitical one-way mirror. Soviet leadership could see out if they wanted, but American leadership, desperate for the smallest glimpse, could not see in. During the darkest days of the Cold War, the intentions of the Kremlin leaders remained obscure at best. The placement of Soviet officials on the reviewing stand atop Lenin’s mausoleum in Red Square during May Day festivities, combined with whatever grainy photos military attachés could get of the Soviet Army’s parade of military equipment, became objects of intense analysis for Western intelligence organizations. Anxious for any information, analysts considered nothing too trivial for scrutiny. The practitioners who studied such minutia had a professional name, Kremlinologists.
However, a small but growing cadre of officers emerged within the CIA who argued that new tradecraft based on advanced technology could be applied to operations on the streets of Moscow just as had been done in the skies above the USSR. These officers, subjected to Soviet counterintelligence tactics behind the Iron Curtain for more than a decade, had acquired a substantial body of operational knowledge that could be used to counter the seemingly invulnerable KGB.22 They argued that if new tradecraft methods, combined with yet-to-be-invented spy gear, were developed and applied selectively, then the KGB’s surveillance stranglehold in Moscow could be broken. This post-OSS generation of case officers found eager allies in Seymour Russell, Chief of the Technical Services