In Defense of CIA’s Derring-Do

One of the greatest success stories of U.S. Cold War espionage was written when CIA officers climbed down into the underbelly of the Soviet Union.

In a largely untold tale of American bravery, Central Intelligence Agency officers worked in tunnels below Moscow, ducking into manholes and scrambling through the muck and mire of the city’s sewers to install and maintain eavesdropping equipment in tunnels carrying Soviet government and military telecommunications.

It was dirty, hazardous work, requiring a special kind of commitment.

“Our boys and girls did some amazing things over there, things beyond what you see in the movies,” said a source familiar with CIA operations.

From the late 1970s until it was betrayed by a CIA officer who defected to the Soviet Union in 1985, the sewer surveillance was one of the CIA’s most highly prized and closely guarded operations inside Moscow. It yielded years of valuable wiretaps from within the Soviet military-industrial complex.

For reasons of secrecy, the public has not been told about the exploits of the CIA’s sewer rats. The agency itself still refuses to confirm or deny their existence.

But now, with the Cold War over, the arguments for secrecy are beginning to appear less compelling. Within the U.S. intelligence community, officials feel a deep and spreading frustration that the public never hears about their triumphs, only their travesties.

Some CIA staff members, both active and retired, want desperately to let the public know that the spy agency does not always screw up, that the billions of dollars that taxpayers poured into intelligence during the Cold War was sometimes--not always, certainly, but sometimes--well spent.

A few of America’s spies are now willing to talk--without the approval of CIA management and mostly without attribution--about their track record against the Soviet Union. Risking federal prosecution for discussing clandestine CIA operations, they want to offer proof that U.S. intelligence scored its share of successes.

Independent verification of their accounts is often impossible. But their tales ring true with congressional aides and outside analysts who are experienced CIA watchers.

The drumbeat of news in the last two years has been largely negative: the arrest of Soviet mole Aldrich H. Ames; the scandal over the CIA’s role in Guatemala; an ugly controversy over sexual harassment and discrimination against female spies, and the humiliating exposure of a botched spy operation against France.

By October, the CIA had become a national laughingstock after investigators sifting through the aftermath of the Ames scandal found that agency officials had knowingly given information from Soviet double agents to the president and other policymakers without disclosing that the intelligence was tainted.

With publicity like that, the agency’s public image began reflecting less of James Bond and more of Maxwell Smart.

Critics Abound

Even more damning was the charge that the CIA utterly failed at its most important Cold War job--to understand events in the Soviet Union. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) leads a legion of critics who have argued that U.S. intelligence not only missed the decline and fall of the Soviet Union but kept insisting that Moscow was an economic and military giant--until the collapse of the Soviet empire. Moynihan said that the CIA did not know what any cab driver in Berlin could have said--that Soviet-style Communist society was rotten to the core.

If that is so, say some senior CIA analysts, then Moynihan has been talking with the wrong people.

These analysts have worked to declassify key intelligence reports to bolster their case that they accurately forecast the Soviet Union’s long slide into oblivion.

“People should nail us for what we did wrong and there is plenty of that,” said Douglas MacEachen, deputy director of intelligence for the CIA--the agency’s chief analyst--until he left for a sabbatical at Harvard University last year. “But we shouldn’t be criticized for what we did right.”

Inside the CIA’s clandestine espionage service, America’s spies also are furious with their new boss, CIA Director John M. Deutch. He issued a statement in December suggesting that Ames had made it hard for the CIA to understand events in the Soviet Union in the last decade of the Cold War.

“Listening to all this stuff, you would think the Russians won the Cold War,” huffed one CIA veteran.

No one is denying that Ames, Edward Lee Howard, the turncoat who exposed the CIA sewer rats, and other American spies caused severe damage or that the CIA was sometimes guilty of incompetence and scandalous behavior.

CIA sources also admit that when it came to verifying arms-control treaties or determining the size of the Soviet army, satellites and listening posts did almost all the work.

But clandestine espionage by human spies helped. And in the end, CIA officials proclaimed themselves the winners in their own private espionage war against their arch-nemesis, the Soviets’ KGB spy agency.

The CIA penetrated Soviet intelligence and the Soviet government to a far greater extent than the KGB, or its Russian successor, the SVR, ever was able to penetrate the U.S. intelligence community, according to current and former CIA officials. The KGB recruited Ames and Howard and a handful of others in the U.S. military and elsewhere but the CIA had many more Russian spies on its side.

Those spies included, according to CIA sources, KGB officers who gave the CIA a running account from inside Soviet intelligence of the failed 1991 coup against Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and SVR officers who provided intelligence on the bloody 1993 showdown between conservative hard-liners and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin.

“We had a big window into what was happening in September 1993 through a Russian intelligence officer who has since defected,” said one source.

Some Turned Away

Much of the CIA’s success at recruiting Soviet agents came during the latter stages of the splintering of the Soviet Union.

By the early 1990s, so many Soviet and then Russian intelligence officers were offering to spy for the CIA that the Americans had to turn some away, picking only those with truly valuable information, sources said. Inflation had ravaged KGB salaries, leaving intelligence officers who once were comfortable members of the elite finding it hard to make ends meet.

“For a while there, KGB officers serving overseas could barely take a source out for a cup of coffee--they had no money,” said a former CIA Soviet analyst.

By 1991, U.S. sources said, a Soviet intelligence officer would approach the CIA to spy for the United States on the average of about once every six weeks.

“We went head-to-head with the KGB for generations but, at the end, it turned into a rout,” said a CIA source. “Game over. We won.”

Many of the best of the CIA’s Russian spies have defected to the United States and are living undercover with lifetime financial support from the CIA. Sources said 40 to 50 defectors from the KGB and the GRU, the former Soviet military intelligence agency, are living undercover in America.

“By the end, we weren’t just getting a handful of rummy old colonels, their version of Rick Ames,” said a CIA source. “We were getting the pride of the KGB.”

There are so many former Russian spies here now that the CIA is struggling to figure out what to do with them all, the source said. The most recent arrivals were rising stars in Moscow and some in the CIA are said to worry that they are growing restless without meaningful work.

Although some former Soviet spies act as consultants to the CIA, none have been hired on its permanent staff. “These guys are bright but aren’t doing what they do best,” a CIA source said.

Much of the CIA’s success in recruiting these Russians had little to do with the CIA. The Soviet collapse sent KGB officers rushing into American arms. Yet the fact that they did so, CIA sources stressed, shows that the agency was able to recover from the damage done by Ames.

“We recruited people who were giving us incredible stuff, stuff that the Soviets would never have allowed us to have if they knew we were getting it,” a CIA source said.

For many at the CIA, the litmus test of success in penetrating the Soviet Union came during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when the U.S. routed Iraqis armed with Soviet-built equipment.

Years of clandestine CIA work paid off. The agency obtained the technical designs, operating manuals and hard copies of virtually every major Soviet weapons system, according to current and former CIA officials.

“There were no technical surprises . . . “ observed Robert M. Gates, who was deputy White House national security advisor during the war and later became CIA director under President Bush.

The foundation for that success was built years earlier, according to both CIA and congressional sources, through SOVMAT--the agency’s top-secret program to buy, borrow or steal the latest in Soviet weaponry.

With a maze of phony corporations and fronts, the CIA’s Soviet materials program often bought weapons from Eastern European governments, which had access to most Soviet equipment as members of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet-led Eastern bloc alliance.

In 1986, for example, CIA front organizations bought a dozen T-72 main battle tanks, the deadliest in the Soviet arsenal, from a Warsaw Pact nation that CIA sources still refuse to identify.

The CIA handed them over to the Army, which made sure that the main U.S. battle tank, the M-1 Abrams, had a longer firing range than the T-72 and that American anti-tank ammunition could penetrate the T-72’s armor.

One Russian spy recruited by the CIA, military scientist Adolph Tolkachev, also played a vital role in giving the United States access to top-secret designs of advanced radar systems for Soviet fighter aircraft.

Tolkachev was betrayed by Howard and arrested and executed in 1985. Before his death, he gave U.S. officials the Soviet designs of advanced “look-down, shoot-down” radar systems.

“They [KGB officials] were just beside themselves when they found out about Tolkachev,” said one source. “We owned their aircraft designs. They were vomiting all over Lubyanka [KGB headquarters in Moscow] when they found out about Tolkachev.”

The CIA also took advantage of its covert involvement in the war in Afghanistan to purloin hundreds of advanced Soviet weapons.

Task Made Easy

Corruption and the breakdown in discipline in the Soviet army in Afghanistan made the CIA’s task easy. The CIA’s Afghan intermediaries bought crates of new weapons directly from the quartermaster of the Soviet 40th Army in Kabul.

Among the weapons were the defensive flares used by Soviet aircraft to counter U.S.-made Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. The CIA gave them to the U.S. Army for testing to determine how best to render them ineffective against Stinger fire. Ultimately, the Stinger proved decisive in turning the tide in favor of the rebels and against the Soviet Army.

With a shopping list from the Pentagon and the CIA’s SOVMAT program in hand, CIA officers operating out of Pakistan sent their Afghan allies out to scour battlefields and supply depots. Afghan rebels even stripped dead Soviet special-forces soldiers, turning their weapons over to the CIA for study.

The CIA also enticed pilots from the Soviet-backed Afghan army to fly to Pakistan and defect, leaving Soviet-built MIG-21 fighters, Mi-24 and Mi-25 attack helicopters and other aircraft to be shipped to the United States. Downed aircraft also were stripped of missiles, avionics and other systems.

In one memorable instance in 1988, free-lance rebels shot down a Sukhoi-24 fighter-bomber and captured its pilot, Alexander V. Rutskoi, then a Soviet air force officer. In exchange for the SU-24, which had crash-landed softly and had suffered little damage, the CIA traded the rebels a Toyota pickup and some rocket launchers. The CIA tried to entice Rutskoi to defect but he returned home and eventually became vice president of Russia and a leader of the unsuccessful 1991 coup against Gorbachev.

“Rutskoi has made a big deal back in Russia about how he was a hero of the Afghan war,” laughed one CIA veteran. “We shipped him home in trade for a Toyota.”

The collapse of East Germany also provided the CIA with a golden opportunity to penetrate the Russian army, which had 300,000 troops stranded after German unification in 1990. Discipline was virtually nonexistent and the CIA moved in to take advantage by recruiting key Russian officers. The CIA’s success apparently contributed to the downfall of the commander of the Soviet’s Western Group of Forces, who was relieved of command in 1991.

The breakdown of Soviet control in the Baltics in the early 1990s also allowed the CIA to embarrass the KGB on what once had been its home turf. Before the Soviets pulled out, sources said, Lithuania’s leaders gave the CIA wide access to the KGB’s regional headquarters in Vilnius, their capital.

“We were down in the basement while they were still up working on the second floor,” said a former CIA official.

Forecast Soviet Crisis

Espionage would not have mattered much if the CIA had not turned the intelligence its spies were gathering into accurate reports for American leaders. Internal CIA reports show that the agency began to document and forecast the Soviet Union’s worsening economic and social problems as early as the late 1970s. Agency analysts predicted that a spiraling decline in Soviet productivity was going to set the stage for an economic crisis and worsening social tensions in the 1980s.

The Reagan administration did not want to hear predictions of Soviet decline, current and former CIA analysts said, and that may help explain why the CIA’s analysis went largely unnoticed.

In fact, while the CIA’s analysts are now blamed for having been too hawkish, they were criticized at the White House and the Pentagon at the time for being too dovish--too eager to believe that Gorbachev’s reforms were real and that the Soviet Union was not the evil empire of Reagan’s rhetoric.

Clashes With Hawks

CIA analysts frequently clashed with their more hawkish counterparts in U.S. military intelligence.

The Defense Department, for example, strongly objected to a 1983 CIA report, still classified, which found that the Soviet army had no intention of using chemical weapons against North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops in an armed conflict. Later, the CIA’s Office of Soviet Analysis argued that the Soviets were light-years behind America in development of a so-called “Star Wars” program--a space-based antiballistic missile system.

In an April 1986 internal memo, the CIA’s Soviet analysts also argued that the U.S. intelligence community, heavily influenced by the Pentagon, was issuing exaggerated forecasts of the number of nuclear weapons the Soviets planned to deploy in the coming decade. That year’s National Intelligence Estimate, published after input from all U.S. intelligence agencies, predicted that the Soviets would deploy a staggering 20,000 strategic nuclear weapons by 1995.

CIA analysts said that was virtually impossible: It would require increases in Soviet spending on strategic forces of 11% to 13% every year for a decade.

“That would imply that Moscow has no intention of even attempting to carry out” any of its economic reforms, the CIA memo said.

Ultimately, the Russians never deployed more than about 12,000, and a treaty signed with the Soviet Union in 1991 by then-President Bush calls for a reduction to 3,500.

Almost as soon as Gorbachev took power in 1985, senior CIA analysts wrote that they believed his efforts to reform Soviet society were genuine. A CIA spy confirmed that Gorbachev’s public statements matched what he was saying in private.

Yet the CIA was also convinced that his economic reforms, which required considerable investment in consumer industries, would force him to cut back sharply on military spending. In November 1985, the directors of Air Force Intelligence and the Defense Intelligence Agency officially dissented from a CIA report concluding that Gorbachev’s domestic reforms would force him to rein in aggressive Soviet foreign and defense policies.

“We were a lonely voice in the intelligence community,” observed George Kolt, a top Russian analyst at the CIA.

Former director Gates added: “The last thing [Casper W.] Weinberger [then defense secretary] wanted to hear was that Soviet defense spending wasn’t growing as fast as we thought.”

Saw Coming of Coup

By 1988, the CIA was reporting that Gorbachev’s halfway reforms had failed and that there was no turning back from his break with the Communist Party and the old order. And in April 1991, the CIA predicted that a hard-line coup against Gorbachev was imminent.

Just before the August coup, the CIA said that such an action was unlikely to succeed because the conservatives had waited too long and had lost the support of the army and the KGB.

Gates, who was accused during his 1991 confirmation hearings of manipulating intelligence reports to suit his political masters, now agrees that the CIA has been getting a bum rap on Russia. When it comes to Moscow, he ruefully acknowledges, Washington politics always get in the way.

“Republicans have always believed that the CIA was underestimating the threat,” Gates said, “and Democrats have always felt we were overestimating it. The CIA is just meat in the sandwich for that debate.”