CIA Defended on Assessing Soviets

While admitting errors along the way, CIA Director Robert M. Gates claimed Wednesday that the CIA had warned U.S. policy-makers well in advance of the emerging economic and political crises in the Soviet Union that led to its collapse.

Responding to complaints that the end of communism caught U.S. intelligence agencies by surprise, Gates maintained that in some respects the CIA was better than the Soviets themselves at Kremlin-watching.

The late Yuri V. Andropov, who headed the KGB secret police before becoming Soviet leader in 1982, once told an aide that published CIA statistics about the Soviet economy were more accurate than those from the Soviet bureaucracy, Gates said in an address to the New York Foreign Policy Assn.

Gates’ speech, a text of which was made available here, sought to make good on a promise during his confirmation hearings to examine the CIA’s record on the Soviet collapse in detail.

On the key issue of Soviet military power, Gates said the agency “considerably understated the real burden economically of the Soviet military” on the Soviet economy.

U.S. intelligence agencies usually put the Soviet military spending at less than 15% of gross national product, when it now is believed to have been as much as four times greater.

It is now clear, Gates said, that military costs helped kill the Communist state. Soviet military spending brought “the already fundamentally flawed economic system to its knees,” he said. “The military helped destroy the system it was built to defend.”

Gates’ review of hundreds of CIA assessments and estimates over 30 years--some so recent they are still secret--did not prove that the U.S. intelligence community fared significantly better than academic experts in recognizing the basic fragility and corruption of the Soviet Communist system before it became obvious in 1989, when the Berlin Wall collapsed.

“The agency did no better or worse in failing to anticipate the magnitude and rate at which the Soviet system fell apart,” Arnold Horelich, senior Sovietologist at the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica and himself a former CIA analyst, said in an interview.

“It did pretty good in picking up the economic decline in the late 1970s,” Horelich said. But the consensus of Sovietologists in and out of government was “that we’d see a gradual decline of the Soviet Union, a system incapable of fundamental reform from within, but that there would be no blowup.”

Gates admitted that until early 1989, the agency did not contemplate that then-Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev would unintentionally begin a process that would bring down the entire state by pulling out the props of the economic system.

In analyzing CIA performance in three modern Soviet eras, Gates said the CIA:

* “Accurately described the weaknesses” of the Soviet Union, particularly its economic problems, from 1959 until 1985, when Gorbachev arrived.

* “Accurately portrayed the futility of (Gorbachev’s) tinkering with the system” between 1985 and 1988, rather than undertaking fundamental reform, and perceived that Gorbachev was “undermining the foundations of the old system without embracing a new one.”

* Warned repeatedly, beginning in 1989, “of the deepening crisis and growing likelihood of a collapse of the old order,” including the possibility of a conservative coup led by a minority of Politburo members and elements of the military and KGB.

A May, 1989, analysis gave Gorbachev only a 50-50 chance of surviving three to four years, he said, and Gorbachev was out in two years. The precise timing of the August, 1991, coup attempt was not forecast by the CIA, Gates acknowledged, but he noted that even the plotters admitted that they had decided to act at the last minute.