CIA’s Webster Predicts ‘Prolonged Crisis’ for Moscow : Soviet Union: He says economic woes could hurt fledgling democracies and calls for ‘cool heads’ in Baltic disputes.

CIA Director William H. Webster predicted Thursday that the Soviet Union is heading into a “deep and prolonged crisis” and warned that Eastern Europe’s deteriorating economic situation is endangering the stability of the newly democratic regimes.

In one of the starkest assessments by a ranking Bush Administration official of the problems facing Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Webster also said that “cool heads” are needed to prevent the escalating dispute over secession in Lithuania from turning into open confrontation.

Webster’s gloomy analysis was echoed Thursday afternoon by a panel of respected Sovietologists, who warned that U.S. policy-makers must plan for the possibility that a civil war could result in the Soviet Union from ethnic unrest, demoralization in the Soviet military and open rifts over the means by which to control those trends.

“What you’ve got is a recipe for big-time trouble, up to and including implosion,” said Jeremy R. Azrael, formerly the CIA’s senior Soviet-watcher.

“I would say the chances of a civil war breaking out in the coming years are one in three or one in four,” added Azrael, who is now a senior analyst of the Santa Monica-based RAND Corp.

Webster’s comments, as well as the unrelated RAND study, underline the perils that Gorbachev faces. In recent days, Bush Administration officials have taken a sympathetic note of the challenges facing Gorbachev. On Wednesday, for example, Bush again resisted calls to show greater support for independence movements in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, telling leaders of Baltic-American ethnic groups that such movements could trigger a crisis and blood bath.

The ethnic unrest has already strengthened the hand of the Soviet military in political decisions after a long period of “remarkable decline” in its clout, said Azrael and four other RAND analysts Thursday.

The military’s senior officers are certain to exercise their new-found influence in negotiations over the reunification of Germany and the reduction of conventional arms in Europe, the RAND panel said.

Their participation, said the Sovietologists, may already have slowed the pace of Soviet arms control concessions and probably contributed to Moscow’s insistence that a reunified Germany remain for some time a member of the Warsaw Pact.

The RAND analysts added that the Soviet military’s renewed political clout is likely to compound Gorbachev’s problems with domestic critics at a time when the Soviet leader is trying to pull off sweeping domestic reforms.

“The high command seems much more disposed than before to throw themselves into the fray on the side of the conservatives,” said RAND’s Robert C. Nurick.

CIA chief Webster underlined the perils of Gorbachev’s plight in a speech before the World Affairs Council of Boston.

Although he called Gorbachev’s reforms “remarkable,” he added: “The new system that he is trying to create is not yet ready to take the place of the old one he has discarded.” As a result, “economic conditions have deteriorated,” the nation’s senior intelligence officer said. “Crime is increasing. Ethnic turmoil is escalating. And now Moscow faces perhaps its greatest challenge--attempts by individual states to secede from the union.”

The creation of a new political order and the shift of resources from defense to consumer goods, he said, have so far failed “to head off consumer discontent.”

“The question remains whether these steps and others to follow will satisfy the Soviet people” and give the republics an incentive to stay in the union, Webster said.

He added that the current wave of elections in Eastern Europe “do not guarantee an easy transition from communism. Tough reforms are going to bring home the hardship of unemployment, higher food prices and inflation.”

In Poland, the costs of comprehensive reforms are “quickly mounting,” he added. Unemployment has jumped from 55,000 in January to 250,000 in just three months. The CIA expects the figure to reach a million by the end of 1990.

In response to dramatic changes throughout the world, Webster also disclosed that the CIA has created a new office for strategic planning and two task forces to deal with international economics and arms proliferation.