U.S. Sovietologists’ Record Mixed but CIA Nominee Is on the Money

His prescience may not help him be confirmed as CIA director, but Monday’s coup against Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev does confirm Robert M. Gates’ reputation: the Bush Administration’s in-house pessimist was right.

So was Alexander N. Yakovlev, Gorbachev’s former top aide who quit the Soviet Communist Party on Friday warning that a hard-line coup was in the works.

But for the legions of American Sovietologists the record is mixed.

“There will be people claiming they were right all along,” said Arnold Horelick, senior Soviet analyst at the RAND Corp. “I just saw someone on television who had been wrong all along claiming to have been right,” he added, declining to name the offender.

The effort to sort out who was right and who was wrong is a classic Washington response to an international crisis, as experts scramble to demonstrate that world events prove the soundness of whatever policy position they have been advocating.

But such questions are more than just an exercise in personal scorekeeping. For years, the competing views of Soviet experts have helped drive U.S. policy, and an event as dramatic as a coup helps shed light on whose advice is worth heeding in the future.

Gates, as a career Soviet analyst and Bush’s deputy national security adviser, has long warned that Gorbachev’s reforms were fragile and, in the end, unlikely to succeed. Those statements brought him at times into conflict with other, more optimistic policy-makers such as Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

Now, after the coup, “there are few people who can look back at what they said with more satisfaction than Gates,” said George Carver, former deputy director of the CIA and now a senior fellow at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Predicting disaster “is not something you want to be right on, but Gates and (Secretary of Defense) Dick Cheney,” who was also pessimistic about Gorbachev’s chances, “are looking pretty good,” said an Administration official.

Whether all that will have any impact on Gates’ nomination to be director of central intelligence is uncertain. The opposition to him has little to do with his views of the Soviets and has centered on questions about what role he played in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Outside the government, there are fewer clear winners or losers.

Unlike experts on the Middle East, many of whom made spectacular fools of themselves predicting U.S. disaster in the Persian Gulf War, practically everyone in the Soviet field has been saying for months--in some cases years--that Gorbachev faced formidable problems and that a coup by the military, the KGB and allied hard-liners was a strong possibility.

“There always were three major possibilities,” Horelick said. One was the “optimistic scenario,” which was the main hope of the Bush Administration’s policy: that Gorbachev would be able to form an alliance with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and together move forward with reforms. As the two leaders reached a series of key agreements during the late spring and early summer, that scenario appeared increasingly possible.

The second scenario, Horelick said, was a continued stalemate and slow-motion collapse of the Soviet economy. And the third--widely discussed by both the left and the right within the Soviet Union--was a coup.

Some Soviet experts admitted surprise at the coup. “I didn’t think they could pull it off,” said Duke University’s Jerry Hough, author of a recent book on Gorbachev.

“Even those of us who thought we knew something about the Soviet Union were surprised,” said Blair Ruble, director of the Kennan Institute in Washington.

But others leaped at the chance to assert that the coup proved they had been right all along.

“First of all, I was not surprised,” said Rep. Dave McCurdy (D-Okla.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. The coup demonstrated that Bush had invested too much in his relationship with Gorbachev and had not been aggressive enough in backing alternative leaders like Yeltsin, McCurdy said.

For other experts, a top concern was making sure that reporters got their names in time. Both Washington’s American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute at Stanford University issued press releases with names and telephone numbers of available experts. By contrast, Harvard University, whose scholars are usually well placed to gain publicity from crises, was shut out: The school’s central switchboard was closed down by the approach of Hurricane Bob.