I was satisfied with my two days of briefing in Brussels in January 1980, but there were policymakers who wanted the NATO delegations to echo the so-called threat to the balance of power and to prepare for harsh measures, including sanctions, against the Soviet Union. The comparison with the current situation in Ukraine is revealing, with the Obama administration divided over the proper response and some European nations opposed to additional harsh sanctions. Once again, the issue of the threat assessment is important to both policymakers and intelligence analysts, but the former typically exaggerate the threat in order to ramp up policy, maintain support from the American public, and arrange for Allied unanimity. Presently, the Obama administration is exaggerating the Russian threat in East Europe for similar reasons.
Intelligence analysts are often caught between intelligence information and policy considerations, the problem of being caught between the fire hydrant and the pissing dog. If the past is any guide, policy demands will trump the intelligence evidence and lead to greater exaggeration of the threat, which will be reflected in media accounts of the crisis based on official and anonymous sources. The exaggerations that accompany the Terror Wars are another example of the mishandling of the threat.
I was never told that there was unhappiness with my briefings in Brussels, and never suffered personally or professionally from going off the policy reservation with my analysis. I went back to work analyzing Soviet actions in the Third World, and remained initially oblivious to the actions of the CIA Directorate of Operations on behalf of the Mujahideen. I was certainly aware of the covert aid by 1986, when I was leaving the building on the way to an assignment as a faculty member at the National War College. Prior to my departure, I encountered the CIA’s chief of operations in Afghanistan, Milton Bearden, and offered my criticism of military assistance for fundamentalist groups that had taken up residence in Pakistan’s disputed territories. Bearden merely replied, “We simply send the arms over there and will let God sort it out.” God is still sorting, and probably won’t be finished until the United States completes its withdrawal, a distant objective three decades later.
Bob Gates wrote in his CIA memoir that covert action in Afghanistan marked the greatest clandestine adventure of all. My own view is radically different. I believe that the most vehemently anti-American Islamists currently operating in Afghanistan are part of the very organizations, such as the Haqqani network and the forces of Gulbiddin Hekmatyar, that the CIA assisted, which tags military support as a glaring CIA failure. Afghan militants such as Haqqani and Hekmatyar have long been considered “global terrorists” by the intelligence community. There were individuals linked to al Qaeda that received support from the CIA. The United States took steps against the perceived ideology of the Soviet Union, only to create a more virulent ideological enemy, militant Islamic jihadism. We have been at war with this new historical enemy for three decades.
With the president, the secretary of state, and the national security advisor in complete agreement that Moscow’s invasion would be followed by additional Soviet force to “improve its strategic position in Southwest Asia,” the role of intelligence was severely circumscribed. Even Secretary Vance anticipated that the Soviets would try to exploit events in Iran, exert “strong influence and pressure” on Pakistan and India, and counter U.S. moves into the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. Brzezinski believed that the Soviet move into Afghanistan would lead to the “domination of Afghanistan,” the promotion of a “separate Baluchistan,” access to the Indian Ocean, and the dismemberment of Pakistan and Iran. The intelligence evidence suggested the Soviet move into Afghanistan was a defensive one, but the political record was dominated by those who believed it was an offensive one that had to be countered.
Vance’s memoirs show him to be a prime example of a headstrong policymaker who had little interest in the intelligence evidence on Afghanistan. He had many false notions about the USSR and Afghanistan that intelligence could have corrected, and no understanding of the domestic political situation in Afghanistan or Moscow’s concerns with spillover of the violence into the Muslim republics in the Soviet Union. He underestimated Moscow’s concerns with political instability in Kabul, and even confused the two key Afghan leaders fighting for supremacy, Nur Mohammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin.
Vance ignored Moscow’s security concerns in the region, and both Vance and Brezhnev wanted to use the Afghan situation to return to the policy of containment that President Nixon and Kissinger had abandoned. President Obama’s conservative critics used the crisis over Crimea and Ukraine to return to the case for containment as well.
CONVINCING THE PRESIDENT OF THE SOVIET “WAR SCARE”
Unlike the CIA’s handling of the Soviet combat brigade, an analytical failure with negative consequences for U.S. policy, the handling of the Soviet “war scare” in 1983 was an analytical success, convincing President Reagan that Moscow genuinely feared the United States was planning a surprise attack against the Soviet Union. Many politicians and pundits in the United States believe to this day that the war scare in Moscow was no more than Soviet disinformation. My reading of the intelligence materials and my understanding of U.S. military exercises as well as my debriefing in 1985 of the former deputy KGB chief in London, Oleg Gordievsky, convinced me that the war scare was real. I was part of a small group of analysts who convinced Director Casey that the scare was genuine, which led Casey to carry the message personally to President Reagan. This was a rare occasion when Casey sided with his Soviet analysts over the objections of his deputy director for intelligence, Bob Gates.
Once the British had exhausted Gordievsky’s knowledge of the war scare and Soviet operational activities, they delivered him to the U.S. intelligence community for debriefings. According to Gordievsky, who was recruited by British intelligence in 1970 after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the KGB had demanded information from all KGB stations regarding the possibility of U.S. preparations for an imminent nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. This order from the KGB “Center” in Moscow took place during the week-long Able Archer exercise, and, although not all KGB officials overseas shared the view of such a possible attack, the “Center” was convinced. Soviet military doctrine, according to Ray Garthoff, had long held that a possible U.S. modus operandi for launching an attack would be to convert an exercise into the real thing.
For the first time, the exercise was going to include President Reagan, Vice President Bush, and Secretary of Defense Weinberger, but when the White House understood the extent of Soviet anxiety regarding U.S. intentions, the major principals dropped out. In his memoirs, Reagan did not mention Gordievsky, but he noted that he was surprised to learn that Soviet leaders were afraid of an American first strike. More importantly, one of the reasons why Secretary of State Shultz was able to convince President Reagan of the need for summit meetings with his Soviet counterpart in 1985 was the president’s belief that it was necessary to convince Moscow that the United States had no plans for an attack.
Although it was not known to the American public at the time, 1983 was the most dangerous year in Soviet-U.S. relations since the Cuban missile crisis. Moscow and Washington were going in different directions, with Reagan declaring a political and military campaign against the “Evil Empire” while Soviet leaders, in the wake of the death of Brezhnev, were looking to end the confrontation that was hurting the Kremlin. The intelligence in that year made it clear that the Soviet Union was in a downward spiral internationally, marked by the quagmire in Afghanistan; the drain of funds in developing countries, particularly Cuba; political and military setbacks in Angola and Nicaragua where covert actions were limiting pro-Soviet regimes; and the growing cost of competing with the largest peacetime increases in the U.S. defense budget since the end of World