CIA Releases Secret Cold War Documents About Soviets

The CIA released secret Cold War documents Friday showing how U.S. analysts overestimated Soviet power and disagreed over how close the world came to a nuclear war over the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

The 859 documents, declassified to coincide with a Central Intelligence Agency conference at Princeton University on U.S. analysis of the Soviet Union from 1947 to 1991, included a conclusion that the Soviet Union, which broke up in 1991, had backed revolutionary groups that used “terrorism.”

A 1981 intelligence report said there was “conclusive evidence” that the Soviet Union supported revolutionary groups that used “terrorism,” specifically mentioning El Salvador.

Lloyd Salvetti, director of the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence, described the release as “a treasure trove of great material.” The documents will be available on the CIA’s Web site: https://www.foia.cia.gov.

An Aug. 27, 1963, CIA paper revealed a deep disagreement between CIA analysts and those of the National Intelligence Council, which draws on several security sources, over how close to the brink Moscow and Washington came over Cuba.

The CIA document refers to an NIC paper that “implies that the Soviet Union was willing to confront the U.S. militarily when the deployment of strategic missiles in Cuba was discovered” in 1962.

“This position cannot be logically supported if one holds, as is almost universally done, that the Soviets were trying to partially correct a grave imbalance in long-range strike capabilities in order to give them a better bargaining position at a later date,” the CIA document said.

Soviet actions showed they clearly realized the only response to U.S. military pressure was a nuclear one and understood the limitation of their nuclear strike capability compared to the United States’, the CIA paper said.

“They obviously took great care to ensure that the situation would not escalate into a thermonuclear war,” CIA analysts at the Office of Research and Reports wrote.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev backed down and withdrew missiles from Cuba after threats from President Kennedy, averting what many feared could be a nuclear war.

Gerald Haines, CIA chief historian, said analysis of NIC reports showed they continued to overestimate the Soviet missile buildup in the 1980s, when President Reagan was promoting his “Star Wars” missile shield plans.

A 1987 analysis of the Soviet Union’s response options to Star Wars concluded that it would probably pursue arms control measures to gain U.S. concessions.

Many independent analysts believe Reagan’s vigorous and hugely expensive buildup of the U.S. military in the 1980s caused the downfall of the Soviet Union, which was unable, with a moribund economy, to match it with a similar buildup.

A September 1991 CIA analysis of the defense implications of a breakup of the Soviet Union concluded that a Russia without Ukraine and other republics would “retain the potential of a major military power.”

Washington has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the last decade helping Moscow demolish parts of its nuclear arsenal, but Russia still retains a force similar in size to that of the United States.

Haines said the documents showed how CIA analysis became based more on facts rather than speculation after technical means of gathering information were employed.