Files Show CIA Warned of Soviet Decline : Intelligence: Agency declassifies reports to refute criticism it was unaware of events. U.S. officials often failed to act on its warnings.

Newly declassified CIA documents reveal that the spy agency warned the George Bush Administration of the likelihood of a coup attempt by hard-liners in the Soviet Union four months before the August, 1991, putsch against Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

The documents also show that as early as May, 1991, the CIA was advising the Bush Administration that Gorbachev would be finished politically even if he survived a coup attempt.

Despite the CIA’s track record in forecasting events in the Soviet Union, U.S. public policy often failed to reflect the realities of the rapidly shifting political conditions there in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and CIA officials believe that they have unfairly borne the brunt of the blame for that failure.

In fact, officials often failed to act on the CIA’s secret warnings. In early 1991, for example, when the CIA reported that Boris N. Yeltsin, now Russia’s president, was the rising star in Soviet politics, Bush stuck doggedly with Gorbachev.

The agency has declassified the documents--primarily containing analysis by CIA Kremlinologists--to refute the growing criticism in Congress and elsewhere that the CIA failed to anticipate the decline and fall of the Soviet Union.

Shortly after the coup attempt, it was reported that U.S. officials had warned Gorbachev a coup was imminent. But the newly disclosed documents offer much greater insight into how early and accurately the CIA began to tell U.S. policy-makers about the likelihood of a coup.

Disclosure of the documents comes at a time when the current criticism is being used to bolster arguments that the CIA’s budget should be cut or the agency should be split into smaller pieces to separate analysis from spy work.

The documents show that the CIA began to predict as early as 1977 and 1978 that growing economic problems in the Soviet Union seemed certain to lead to great political upheaval in the 1980s.

Yet some in the agency now believe that the criticism it encountered over Soviet analysis underscores at least one problem: failure to communicate properly with top policy-makers at the White House. The agency often failed to provide tightly focused intelligence reports that could catch the attention of the President and his national security advisers, some CIA officials now acknowledge.

New CIA Director John M. Deutch has learned a lesson from that failure and is now demanding that analytical work on the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina and other issues be far more concise. Deutch has even stationed a CIA liaison officer at the White House to make sure that CIA analytical work quickly gets to the right desks inside the White House.

Clinton Administration officials praise the CIA’s current efforts to sharpen previously long-winded and sometimes inconclusive reports. “This is a lot more user-friendly group,” said one White House official, referring to Deutch’s new team.

The documents show that the CIA warned the Bush White House as early as April 25, 1991, that leaders of the Soviet military, the MVD internal security police and the KGB intelligence service were “making preparations for a broad use of force in the political process.” The secret CIA report added that “preparations for dictatorial rule have begun.”

The documents also show that in May, 1991, the CIA was advising Bush that Gorbachev was finished politically. That analysis came at a time when the Bush Administration was still committed to bolstering Gorbachev’s faltering hold on power in Moscow.

“Even if Gorbachev manages to remain, his domination of the Soviet political system has ended and will not be resurrected,” the CIA said in a May 23, 1991, secret report titled “Gorbachev’s Future.”

President Bush did agree to see Yeltsin when he visited Washington in June, 1991--reversing his Administration’s earlier disdain for the Russian leader. Still, the Bush White House remained publicly committed to Gorbachev.

In its May analysis, the CIA also predicted that the coup plotters probably would fail, because they were delaying action so long that they could not count on the loyalty of the Soviet Union’s rapidly fragmenting internal security services, including the KGB.

“If traditionalists seize power, with massive use of force and repression, they might temporarily re-establish control of most of the country, but they would not provide a long-term solution, particularly for the economy,” the CIA reported in May, 1991. “Time is working against the traditionalists. . . . The longer force is not used, the weaker their position will become.”

Again in August, in a report that is still classified, the CIA predicted that a coup was imminent.

Yet after the end of the Cold War, congressional leaders were so concerned about what they saw as the CIA’s failures that they prodded the CIA to bring in outside experts to review its work on the Soviet Union. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), a leading critic, has complained that “for all our enormous intelligence apparatus, we missed the collapse of the Soviet Union completely. No one knew what the deal was.”

But CIA officials and their supporters said Moynihan’s charges are baseless.

“It is absolutely wrong to say that the CIA missed it,” said Jack Matlock, who was U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991--and who personally warned Gorbachev in June, 1991, of an imminent coup.

“It’s become a persistent myth that they didn’t see the decline of the Soviet Union,” Matlock said. “Their analysis was excellent. They didn’t predict everything, but who the hell can? They didn’t predict the day of the coup, but even the coup plotters didn’t decide until the last minute. Moynihan’s charges are crazy.”

The perception that the CIA missed the turning point has become such an accepted part of Washington wisdom that CIA officials now acknowledge they must have failed to get their views across forcefully enough even to their own bosses inside the CIA.

CIA officials now admit, for example, that they spent too much time trying to issue numerical estimates of the size of the Soviet economy and the scale of Soviet defense spending in dollar terms--numbers that the CIA admits turned out to be wildly inaccurate.

“The economic numbers clouded the impression of what we were doing, because people focused only on the numbers,” said George Kolt, the CIA’s national intelligence officer for Russia and Central Eurasia. “People weren’t reading the underlying text that we were putting out of how bad that economy was. [Policy-makers] would say: ‘Don’t give me a lot of stuff. Give me the numbers.’ ” The CIA’s reputation on Soviet analysis may also have suffered from White House politics, especially during the Ronald Reagan Administration. Reports on the Soviet Union were often disregarded or ignored because they seemed to bring news that was at odds with Administration policy.

And top CIA officials may have applied pressure on analysts to conform to the conventional wisdom in Washington in the mid-1980s that Gorbachev’s Soviet Union was still a dangerous enemy. Sources said that in mid-1985, for example, Robert M. Gates, then deputy director of the CIA for intelligence and later CIA director, wrote a memo, which is still classified, in which he challenged CIA analysts who were issuing pessimistic forecasts for the Soviet economy.

“There was a very, very tense atmosphere [at the CIA] on the issue of the Soviet threat,” said one source. “And people who were looking to be part of the . . . Establishment didn’t run around saying that the threat was going to be mitigated.”