U.S. Needs Better Political Insight Than CIA Can Produce : Intelligence: Not once since it was created has the agency gathered enough information to warn of the ouster of the Soviet leadership.

“Question: What do you believe the motivation is, sir, behind the coup? Why did they remove him?

President Bush: We don’t know that . . .

Question: Mr. President, do you actually know who’s in charge right now . . . ?

Answer: . . . We don’t know who’s in charge. . . . “

The above exchange took place during the President’s press conference on Aug. 19, after the official Tass news agency announcement that Mikhail Gorbachev had been relieved of his duties for health reasons. But the same answers could have been given by every other American President who has been surprised at the ouster of a Soviet leader. Not once since it was created in 1947 has the CIA detected enough information to warn policy-makers of such an event.

The U.S. government’s lack of information about and knowledge of the Soviet political system--coupled with the failure of the intelligence community to warn of actions by Soviet leaders that pose grave threats to world security--is appalling. We have been repeatedly shocked not only by such political events as the denunciation of Josef Stalin, the fall of Nikita Khrushchev, and the choice of successors to Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, but also by Soviet military actions (against Berlin in 1948, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979), missile production (throughout the 1960s), rocket deployments (to Cuba in 1962) and defense spending generally for the past 30 years.

Why is it so hard to get our estimates of Soviet decisions and decision-makers right?

First, the Soviet Union is one of the most baffling political systems to understand or penetrate. Power is manipulated by a small cabal, whose members keep secrets from one another. As a result, some Soviet leaders do not know how they will act until the question of whom to support or what to do is actually posed. So there are no leaks and few credible agents in place or defectors who really know what is going on.

Second, and partly because Soviet politics seems so enigmatic, the U.S. intelligence community has concentrated most of its resources on what is known in Washington circles as “bean counting.” The “beans” refer to Soviet weapons, missiles and nuclear warheads, and the case can always be made that it is critical to get these numbers right to ensure compliance with arms-control treaties. Such weapons are hard to count and arms-control monitoring is important. But over the past 15 years, the intelligence community has tended to devote far more resources to this task than to comprehending how and when Soviet weapons would be used against American interests. Consequently, every American President has left office decrying the lack of U.S. capacity to render meaningful political analysis about Soviet leaders--as well as those of other countries--with the capacity to do us harm.

Third, the leadership of the intelligence community is afraid of “crying wolf.” What this means is that in writing reports to top U.S. policy-makers, analysts bend over backward to avoid alerting the President to threats lest they fail to materialize as predicted. No one wants to write a brief that will remembered because it woke the President needlessly. So reports are hedged to the point where no clear warning is given. In this Soviet crisis, according to Condoleezza Rice (the chief Soviet specialist at the National Security Council until earlier this year), there were so many references to the precariousness of Gorbachev’s position that top policy-makers became “inured” to such news and had “no reason to believe that things were any different until now.”

Which of these reasons obscured reality in the present case will be debated for some time to come. But one key lesson is already clear: the United States needs much better political intelligence to navigate the post Cold War world and the CIA has proved repeatedly that it cannot produce it.