In order to prepare for a role in the world of strategic arms control, I had to leave the Office of Current Intelligence, which concentrated on political intelligence, and spend two years in the Office of Strategic Research, which studied the Soviet strategic arsenal. It was a world of obscure acronyms—MIRVs, SLBMs, SSBN, ABMs, and ICBMs—and special terms—throw weight, counterforce, countervalue—that had little currency outside the national security community. Fortunately, the chief of the Office of Strategic Research, Bruce Clarke, was one of the genuine stars in the Intelligence Directorate and offered a great deal of assistance in my first months on the job. When I couldn’t get a handle on Soviet strategic submarines that were nuclear-capable, Clarke said it should be easy for me: the J-class, E-class, W-class, and S-class. Clarke assumed that a Jew could grasp this.
The disarmament process was an interagency one, requiring every aspect of the negotiations to be vetted by five major U.S. policy departments before being broached with the Soviets. The CIA typically lined up with the Department of State and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency on the disarmament process; the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were dedicated to blocking arms control. The CIA played the key role in enabling civilian agencies to overcome opposition from the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which falsely argued that a Soviet ground-to-air missile defense could be upgraded to an anti-ballistic missile system and that the Soviet SS-9 had multiple warheads. The military’s arguments were designed to block the Anti-Ballistic Missile and SALT agreements, respectively.
One of the major blunders in the SALT I treaty was the failure to ban multiple warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles. Even Secretary of State Kissinger acknowledged this failure as a serious policy blunder. The Department of State, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and the CIA favored a ban and strongly believed prohibition of multiple-warhead missile testing could be verified with satellite photography. The Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to pursue production of multiple-warhead missiles, which they had not yet developed, so an opportunity was lost to put a ban on multiple-warhead missiles in the treaty. The militarization of the CIA and the dissolution of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency complicate the bureaucratic task of reaching a new consensus on any disarmament treaty.
One of the key reasons for the opposition of presidential Chief of Staff Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to the CIA (and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency) in the 1970s was these agencies’ support for arms control. The conflict was renewed during the administration of President George W. Bush, when the CIA pushed back against some of their arguments for invading Iraq. Overall, however, the CIA caved in to Cheney’s importuning.
My major job as intelligence advisor to the SALT delegation in Vienna was preparing a daily briefing for the delegates, providing the opportunity to discuss political and military issues with the chief of the U.S. delegation, Ambassador Gerald Smith; the Joint Chiefs of Staff representative, General Royal Allison; the Department of Defense representative, Paul Nitze; the Department of State representative, Ambassador Raymond L. Garthoff; and the representative from the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Harold Brown. The Nitze briefing was the toughest one because he followed all military and political issues and had definite ideas about the intelligence problems associated with geopolitical issues, not merely strategic weapons issues. He was initially unfriendly to negotiating with the Soviets, although he reversed course and led the efforts to eliminate all intermediate nuclear forces 15 years later. I assisted Nitze in other ways, because he had a drinking problem and I had to help him make his goodbyes from several social occasions.
The Brown briefing was easy, because he wasn’t interested in getting intelligence briefings; in fact, he was often not in attendance at the talks in Vienna. When the bilateral discussions became intense, Brown was around; when they grew desultory, Brown wasn’t even in Austria. General Allison was an interesting figure, because his riding boots were always on his desk, either returning from being shined or placed to be picked up for shining, which was a daily ritual for the general’s enlisted aide. Only the general, of course, had an aide. Briefing Ray Garthoff was a pure pleasure; he was one of the savviest people I dealt with in my 24 years at the CIA and the State Department.
The assignment in Vienna offered discussions on arms control and geopolitical issues with Soviet counterparts, including representatives of Soviet intelligence, the KGB. Whereas U.S. representatives had a rich social life that included trips to the Vienna opera and wonderful banquets, the Soviets did not permit their representatives to mix with the Austrian populace, let alone other diplomatic representatives. When I discussed this fact with my Soviet counterparts, they replied that they were simply “birds in a gilded cage.” The Soviet delegation didn’t even have access to secure communications back to Moscow, and had to travel to Czechoslovakia to report sensitive negotiating matters to the Kremlin.
The CIA’s role in the arms control process was a central one, because no treaty would garner Senate ratification unless the U.S. intelligence community could verify all aspects of the terms. Director Helms didn’t like having the CIA identified with verification of the treaties; he told us at a meeting in his office that “verification was a political process, and only policy agencies could verify” a treaty. He preferred to call the interagency process the Monitoring Panel, but Kissinger preferred the title “Verification Panel,” and verification it became.
Kissinger understood that throughout the Cold War the CIA had the best record in tracking Soviet weapons developments, which ensured that Moscow never developed or procured, let alone deployed, a strategic weapon without the CIA analysts providing advance warning to the National Security Council and the Pentagon. Sadly, several decades later, the CIA’s mishandling of Iraqi weapons assessments in 2002–2003 compromised the Agency’s credibility, leading to the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2004 and diminishing the role of the director of CIA in producing the President’s Daily Brief and National Intelligence Estimates.
Disarmament negotiations made little progress from 1969 to 1971, until the Vienna round that coincided with the beginning of the U.S.-China rapprochement. Soviet representatives at SALT understood that the U.S.-inspired initiative was aimed at Moscow. As a result, the Kremlin knew it must improve relations with the United States by coming to terms with the SALT agreement to limit offensive strategic ballistic missiles; the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to protect strategic deterrence; and the Treaty of Berlin to quell tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union around the divided city of Berlin. My background cables from Vienna emphasized that Soviet anxiety over the new Washington-Beijing diplomatic channel provided opportunities for the United States. I was not crossing the line into policy advocacy; I was merely calling attention to an opportunity for the United States, a key aspect of intelligence reporting.
The Soviets feared rapprochement between the United States and China would be at their expense, diminishing the importance of the Kremlin’s ties with Washington. Prior to the news of an improvement in Sino-American relations, the Soviets pursued an unorthodox device to bring the United States into a bilateral treaty against Beijing. In Vienna in March 1971, in the best spy-novel tradition, the Soviet ambassador to SALT, Vladimir Semenov, passed a note to his U.S. counterpart, Ambassador Smith, proposing a bilateral agreement to prevent or retaliate against a provocative attack by third parties (i.e., China). Kissinger believed the proposal was a Soviet attempt to get a free hand against China in a crisis situation without concern for the U.S. response. Semenov’s initiative demonstrated the Kremlin’s concern with a Sino-American rapprochement, and thus pointed to an opportunity for U.S. diplomatic dividends.
The unsigned note called for Moscow and Washington to take retaliatory action if one or the other were attacked by a third party. Both Moscow and Washington were using the SALT dialogue to prevent accidental or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons, which led to the Agreement on Measures to Reduce the Risk of Outbreak of Nuclear War in September 1971, but Semenov’s initiative was a bizarre effort