I HAVE RECENTLY READ HERB MYERS LETTER OF 28 JUNE 1984 PRESENTING HIS PERCEPTIONS ON THE SOVIET UNION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP86M00886R001000010007-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 42
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 30, 2010
• Sequence Number: 7
• Publication Date: September 24, 1984
• Content Type: LETTER

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
3637 (10-81)
EXECUTIVE SECRETARIAT
ROUTING SLIP
TO:
Compt
D/OLL
C/IPD/OIS
Remarks
xecutive secretary
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
24SEP194
Honorable William H. Casey
Director of Central Intelligence
Washington, D. C. 20505
I have recently read Herb Myers' letter of 28 June 1984
presenting his perceptions on the Soviet Union and detailing a
long term strategy for "denying the Soviets an external
solution to their problem." I agree with his perceptions of
the Soviet Union and also his call for a cohesive strategy.
I also agree that any long term strategy developed should
be bi-partisan and exclude the concepts of the extreme right
or left.
If a re-evaluation of our strategy is initiated, I offer
whatever assistance I can provide and would welcome the
opportunity to participate.
Sincerely,
cc: Mr. McMahon
Mr. Meyer
RESEARCH AND
ENGINEERING
(SAA)
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
Executive Registry
84 9123
STAT
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886R001000010007-6
THE DIRECTOR OF
.,; C'NTRA-L'INTELLIGENCE
NOTE FOR: DCI
DDCI
DDI
28 June 1984
DDI-O F L
FROM: Herbert E. Meyer, VC/NIC
Here's an exceptionally rich com-
pendium of (unevaluated) reporting of
life in the Soviet Union.
AV
Herbert E. Meyer
Distribution:
1 - Each addressee (w/att)
1 - ER (wt att)
1 - VC/NI Chrono
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886R001000010007-6
STAT
CAo
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
The Director of Central Intelligence
Washington, D.C. 20505
National Intelligence Council
MEMORANDUM FOR: Director of Central Intelligence
FROM: Herbert E. Meyer, Vice Chairman
National Intelligence Council
SUBJECT.: What Should We Do About The Russians?
28 June 1984
1. For nearly forty years now, we and our predecessors in the
intelligence and foreign-policymaking communities have devoted the bulk
of our time and energies to the search for an answer to one single
question: What should we do about the Russians?
2. This search has taken on a special urgency during the last
several months, as Soviet events, actions, and attitudes have combined
to focus unprecedented attention on the superpower rivalry and, once
more, raised the specter of a serious US-Soviet collision: The Soviets
have walked out on three sets of arms-reduction talks, buried Yuri
Andropov after a brief but violent reign that included the shootdown of
KAL Flight 007, admitted publicly that for a year they had been lying
about Andropov's state of health, and selected the visibly ailing
Konstantin Chernenko as their new leader. The Soviets have harassed
Western commercial flights to and from Berlin, fired on a US Army
helicopter along the German-Czech border, and announced the presence of
nuclear-armed Soviet submarines off the US East Coast. They have
launched a set of military exercises that scared the wits out of some
Western observers, boycotted the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los
Angeles, unleashed an anti-US propaganda barrage more strident and
sustained than any in recent memory, and generally tried to whip up a
war scare that in tone and substance bears an uncanny resemblance to the
one that occurred in 1927, which historians now believe Stalin cooked up
as part of a (successful) effort to quash domestic enemies.
3. As a participant in the current flurry of meetings, brain-
storming sessions, water-cooler conversations, working lunches, even
dinner parties--and as an avid student of earlier such flurries--I am
struck by a recurring flaw: We always focus on the need for a policy;
STAT
q1 0
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
we never focus on the need for a strategy. But without a strategy--the
deployment of a nation's political, economic, psychological, and
military forces to afford the maximum support to its adopted policies--
any policy regardless of its merit will lack the strength to survive
when trouble strikes. Little wonder that so many of the Soviet policies
we have pursued during the last forty years--under Republicans,
Democrats, liberals, and conservatives--have ultimately been blown away
like flimsy buildings by tornados.
4. An effective strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union is now
within our grasp, and it is the purpose of this memo to spell it out.
The key to this strategy lies in a new, almost revolutionary perception
of the Soviet Union itself that is taking hold among specialists,
scholars, and observers throughout the West. This perception is one
that I share--in part because it goes a long way toward explaining
current Soviet behavior--and which'I detailed in an earlier memo
entitled Why Is the World So Dangerous? To briefly recapitulate:
-- After 67 years of communist rule, the Soviet Union
remains a nineteenth-century-style empire, comprised of more
than 100 nationality groups and dominated by the Russians.
There is not one major nationality group that is content with
the present, Russian-controlled arrangement; not one that does
not yearn for its political and economic freedom.
- Since the imperial system is itself fatally flawed,
all empires eventually decay. And at long last history seems
to be catching up with the world's last surviving empire.
Decades of over-emphasis on military production have wrecked
the country's civilian industrial and technological base.
More precisely, the Soviets have failed miserably to generate
the kinds of innovations on which modern economies are
increasingly dependent: robotics, micro-electronics,
computerized communications and information-processing
systems. Even if the Soviets could develop such systems, they
could not deploy them without losing the political control on
which the Communist Party depends for its very survival. For
after 40 years of fear among Western intellectuals that
technology would lead inexorably to Big Brother societies
throughout the world, it now turns out that technology, in the
form of personal computers sand the like, has put
communications and information processing beyond the control
of any central authority. Unwilling and unable to develop and
deploy innovations like these--as we in the West are doing
with such robust enthusiasm--the Soviet Union now can produce
little but weapons. As a result, the Soviet economy has
become stagnant and may even be starting to shrink--a trend
that already has begun to make even the production of weapons
more costly and inefficient.
-_ At the same time, The Soviet Union has become demographic basket-case. Today only about half the country's
2
UNCLASSIFIED
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
UNCLASSIFIED
population can speak Russian; for an industrialized,
technologically-advanced society, this is intolerable.
Moreover, so low has been the Russian birthrate that in coming
years the able-bodied working-age population of the Russian
Republic, which contains roughtly two-thirds of the Soviet
Union's total industrial production capacity, will actually
decline. This is not merely a drop in the growth rate; it is
a drop in the total number of warm bodies showing up each
morning, drunk or sober, for work. Moreover, high birthrates
in the Moslem republics have begun to soak up vast amounts of
investment for schools, hospitals, roads, and so forth. Thus,
fewer and fewer Russians must work harder and harder to
support more and more non-Russians. This sort of thing cannot
go on indefinitely. Nor can the trend itself be reversed in
less than several decades.
-- All this' is compounded by a growing contentiousness
and disarray within the communist world itself. Moscow's
efforts to ease domestic economic pressures by shifting the
burden to its East European satellites are meeting with
growing resistance from satellite leaders, who rightly fear
for their own grips on power. One reflection of this fear is
the rising level of opposition among East European leaders to
Moscow's plans for higher levels of defense spending by the
satellites; another is these leaders' unprecedented vocal
efforts to coax the Soviets back to the arms-reduction
tables. Obviously the Soviets have sufficient military power
to get their way, but now the chances are increasing that the
Soviets will need to use this power. And elsewhere in the
communist world--against every tenet of Marxist philosophy--
communist nations are waging war among themselves. More
precisely, the Soviet Union and China, having fought one
another along their common border, are now fighting against or
through their respective surrogates: China versus Vietnam;
Vietnam versus Kampuchea.
5. From Moscow's point of view, history could not have chosen a
worse moment to catch up with the Soviet empire. After a period of
drift, the US is once again leading the West forward:
-- Our own economy is recovering--growth has lately been
running at an annual rate of more than 9 percent, a level that
delights everyone except the gloom-and-doom mongers on Wall
Street--with the only argument among serious economists
focusing on the size and breadth of the boom.
-- US defense spending is up, with the debate in
Congress and on the campaign hustings focusing only on the
proper size of the increase.
-- We and our allies have begun to limit the flow of
credits to the Soviet Union.
3
UNCLASSIFIED
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
-- We and our allies have begun to staunch the
hemorrhage of technology to the Soviet Union.
-- With initial deployment of Pershing Its and cruise
missiles, NATO is at last beginning to change the balance of
power in Europe back to its favor.
-- With the emergence of five anti-communist
insurgencies--in Nicaragua, Mozambique, Angola, Kampuchea, and
Afghanistan--the Soviet drive for Third World dominance has
been slowed. And, of course, our own country's use of
military power to set free Grenada has shattered the myth that
communist revolutions are irreversible. Now it is their
dominoes that are toppling.
6. Moreover, we now stand orf the threshold of an historic change
in the very nature of warfare. Technology is shifting the advantage
from offense to defense. Since the US is a defensive power while the
Soviet Union remains an offensive one, the long-term edge is now moving
in our direction. This, of course, is why the Soviets are so worried by
our own emphasis on high-technology weapons such as cruise missiles and
precision-guided munitions; it means that the US has both recognized and
acted upon the new reality. This also explains why the Soviets are
having fits over the President's Strategic Defense Initiative, although
this is a longer term project. Given our country's awesome record of
success when we combine our scientific and technological prowess with our
industrial strength--the Manhattan and Apollo projects come to mind--the
Soviets must assume that eventually we will succeed. And when we do,
Soviet rockets will cease to be a threat to anyone.
7. From the moment that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
seized power back in 1917, the primary thrust of its propaganda has been
to convince not only its own people but also those of us in the West
that the Party's revolution is irreversible; that the Soviet Union as
organized by Lenin & Co. is a stable, permanent state. So successful
has been this propaganda effort that for decades the conventional wisdom
here in the West has been just this: that the Soviet Union is here to
stay. One corollary of the conventional wisdom is that the US-Soviet
rivalry is itself a permanent feature of life on earth.
8. Yet the new perspective that I outlined in Why Is the World So
Dangerous, and which I have briefly recapped here, fundaments y
challenges both the conventional wisdom and its corollary. This
perspective recognizes the Soviet Union for what it is--an empire--and
accepts that like- all empires this one must eventually decay. Moreover,
this perspective holds that the beginnings of this decay are now
evident. Indeed, since publication of that earlier memo information has
continued to accumulate which suggests that the decay is progressing:
4
UNCLASSIFIED
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 N
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
-- The selection of Konstantin Chernenko as Andropov's
successor indicates strongly that the bureaucracy could not
stomach even the modest economic reform efforts that were
begun after Brezhnev's death. The political leadership has
virtually ceased to talk of reform; stagnation thus is likely
to continue.
-- Living standards in the Soviet Union are beginning to
decline. Marshall Goldman, the Harvard University Soviet
specialist, now reports that food is in short supply outside
the Moscow-Leningrad area and that rationing has been imposed
in 12 cities. According to recent issues of published Soviet
medical literature, five of seven key communicable diseases
are now out of control: polio, diptheria, scarlet fever,
whooping cough, measles. Georgetown University demographer
Murray Feshbach--among the most competent and reliable
students-of Soviet life--reports that according to published
Soviet statistics, so high is the incidence of measles that it
now stands fractionally below the level at which
epidemiologists attribute the problem to mass malnutrition.
Feshbach's earlier research has shown that throughout the
Soviet Union infant mortality is rising and life expectancy is
falling.
A sense of deep pessimism has taken hold among the
Soviet people. One reflection of this is the abortion rate,
which for the Soviet Union as a whole is between 60 percent
and 70 percent, and which for Slavs and Balts is 75 percent to
80 percent. We simply cannot attribute these staggering rates
entirely to the low quality of available birth-control
products and to decisions by sensible, practical parents to
limit the size of their families because their apartments lack
sufficient space for comfort. Rather, we must view these
rates, at least partly, as an indication of the average
couple's judgment of life in the Soviet Union. As Frank
Shakespeare puts it, these abortion rates reflect a vision of
the future that is bleak and despairing almost to the point of
national suicide.
-- Artistic works are often a leading indicator of a
society's perception of its own prospects, and Soviet artists
are turning now to themes of looming decline. A singer/poet
named Bulat Okudzhava has lately been serenading audiences at
a Moscow cabaret with a little number that strikingly compares
today's Soviet Union with the Roman empire in its last days.
Here's the first verse:
"The Roman Empire at the time of the decline
Maintained the appearance of firm order.
The-leader was in his place, with his comrades in
arms at his sides,
Life was wonderful, judging by reports.
5
UNCLASSIFIED
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886R001000010007-6
But the critics will say that the expression
'comrade in arms' is not a Roman detail,
That this mistake deprives the whole song of
meaning.
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps it isn't Roman...."
-- For the first time ever, articles are appearing in
Soviet newspapers and magazines that talk about "the
contradictions of socialism," and vaguely suggest the need for
basic structural changes. Given the limits of what one can
say in the Soviet press--and remain at large to say again--
this is explosive stuff indeed. Clearly, commentators are
sending strong signals that in their view fundamental changes
are needed, and the sooner the better, if the regime is to
survive in its present form.
9. This growing sense of pessimism and looming decline may well
account for much of current Soviet behavior. In a vague but very
profound way, Soviet leaders are starting to recognize that something
has gone hideously wrong. We are not talking here about merely a bad
stretch in relations with the US or a temporary run of bad luck; we are
talking here of a perceived fundamental shift in the balance of future
power. History is no longer on Moscow's side--if ever it was--and
Soviet leaders sense they lack the wit, the energy, the resources, and
above all the time, to win it back. Thus the current burst of vicious,
vitriolic rhetoric and action. It is like the first reaction of a very
nasty man whose career has been soaring from triumph to triumph over the
broken bodies of his enemies--and who with final victory in sight has
just learned he has a terminal illness.
10. The implications of all this are staggering. If indeed the
Soviet Union is an empire at the beginning of its decline, one of three
courses is likely:
-- The Soviets could undertake fundamental reforms.
This remains a possibility, and obviously we must be alert to
any indicators. But it seems probable that the Soviet
leadership will not make the changes necessary to either
reverse these trends or cope with them. Kremlin leaders could
boost their country's economic growth rate only by slashing
the defense budget or by enacting massive economic reforms.
Either remedy would threaten the Communist Party's grip on
power, and this is a price that Kremlin leaders have always
been loath to pay. The demographic nightmare is equally
difficult to end. Moscow cannot transfer industrial-
production capacity from the Russian to the non-Russian, and
especially non-Slav, republics. Doing so would give these
republics more power over Moscow than Moscow is willing to
risk. And Moscow cannot import workers to Russian factories
from Moslem republics because these workers (a) don't speak
Russian, (b) don't want to come, and (c) would be bitterly
6
UNCLASSIFIED
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
UNCLASSIFIED
resented by Russian workers, who would be required to share
scarce housing and food with individuals they view as racially
inferior.
-- The Soviets could blow it. That is, they could fail
to stop their empire s ddecay and, over time, allow the Soviet
Union to drift into a downward spiral from which would emerge
a different sort of society. To be sure, we have no idea of
what this successor society would look like. It might be a
"better" society, which is to say a freer and more democratic
one. Or it might be different from the present society but
every bit as mean and repressive. And we can only guess at
the future relationship between the Russian Republic--the
imperial power, so to speak--and the fourteen non-Russian
republics that now comprise the Soviet Union. But clearly,
any sort of imperial free fall,would produce a political
structure that, at least for a while, would be less
threatening to the West than the current regime.
-- The Soviets could decide to o for it. Faced with a
"use-it-or-lose-it" situation, Soviet leaders could choose a
high-risk course designed to change the correlation of forces
before it is too late to do so. As you recall, it is this
option that was the focus of Why Is the World So Dangerous?
The thrust of my argument there was that as Soviet leaders
perceive that time is no longer an ally, the range of options
they would be willing to consider will inevitably widen. Thus
we must prepare for the possibility that the Soviets will do
something very, very dangerous--for instance a grab for the
Persian Gulf, an attack on Western Europe, even a first strike
on the US. Again, as in that earlier memo, I emphasize that I
do not predict any of these actions. I merely point out--and
this is worrisome enough--that to some Soviets these actions
may no longer be too risky to consider. Thus my concern that
the coming years will be the most dangerous that we have ever
known.
11. IT IS PRECISELY BECAUSE THE COMING YEARS WILL BE SO DANGEROUS
THAT WE NEED TO DESIGN, ARTICULATE, AND IMPLEMENT A STRATEGY FOR DEALING
WITH THE SOVIET UNION THAT WILL AVOID WAR. THE THRUST OF THIS STRATEGY,
SIMPLY PUT, SHOULD BE TO DENY THE SOVIETS AN EXTERNAL SOLUTION TO THEIR
PROBLEM. The logic runs like this:
The Soviet Union is the world's last empire, and
after 67 years of communism it has entered its terming
phase. We should be no more surprised, or alarmed, or
relieved about this than by the sunset at day's end; it is
merely inevitable, and our choice is not whether to accept it
but how best to respond. The only operational question is the
rate of descent.
We will do nothing whatever to try and "brin down"
the Soviet regime. More b untly, we are not going to charge
7
UNCLASSIFIED
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
in there throwing bombs at them. Any effort of this sort, by
any country, would be dangerously stupid. We won't engage in
this sort of activity, and we will stop anybody else who
tries. We will let the Soviet Union's rate of decline be
managed by our strongest ally: history.
By the same token, we won't go out of our way to
pro up the faltering Soviet re ime. It's easy to see why in
coming years the Soviets will see massive amounts of Western
financial and technical assistance. But we and our allies
have learned the hard way that the Soviets use whatever help
we give not to improve their country's standard of living but
rather to build and deploy more weapons. You don't loan a man
money--at any rate of interest--if you know from experience
that rather than feed his family he'll buy a gun and rob your
own-bank. Putting aside common, sense and morality--which
bankers have been known to do-=this sort of business is
financially dumb. The tiny profit is more than wiped out by
the expense of additional robbery insurance and physical
security measures. When Soviet officials come calling for
economic and technological help, we should politely but firmly
turn them away. And we should keep them from stealing what
they want.
-- Our hope is that Soviet leaders will turn their
considerable skills and energies to reforming their system.
We and our allies would like nothing better than a stable,-
secure, prosperous, free Soviet Union. If Moscow will--display
even the smallest sign of moving in this direction, we'and our
allies should and will help in every way we can. Indeed, we
yearn to negotiate seriously with the Soviet Union across the
entire spectrum of contentious issues--arms reduction, of
course, but also the sorts of economic, scientific,
technological, and environmental agreements that would help
improve standards of living and lessen the dangers of war
throughout the world.
-- Our concern is that Soviet leaders will prove
unwilling,_
nwillin , or unable, to undertake fundamental reforms. And
if they can't, or won't, well that s too bad. The decline of
an empire is never a very pleasant thing for those who live
within its borders, and we.wish all Soviet peoples the best of
luck as they go about the difficult business of coping with
the transformation of the current political structure into
something else--something we hope and pray will serve them
better than the structure they have now.
-- Our goal is to make absolutel certain that at no
time during the comin years do Soviet leaders conclude t at
they can somehow save themselves by destroying us. This is-
more than merely protecting -ourselves from failing bricks.
That's easy. We need to anticipate the sorts of aggressive
actions that a faltering empire might be tempted to take and
which, if successful, would either reverse the decline or slow
8
UNCLASSIFIED
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
it down. And we need to establish a set of conditions under
which, should in fact the Soviets be tempted, they will in the
end resist on grounds that it just wouldn't work. It's a bit
like establishing conditions in a neighborhood so that a
hungry drifter who peers through the kitchen window of a house
and sees a twenty-dollar bill lying on the table decides, in
the end, to leave it there for fear he couldn't get away with
it. Perhaps in time we could even get that drifter to knock
politely on the door, and to ask if there is any work that
needs doing.
12. Obviously, we will need a strong defense to make this strategy
work. More precisely, we will need to prevent the Soviets from cutting
off access to oil and other raw materials that we and our allies import
from Third: World countries--as they are attempting to do now in the
Persian Gulf and in southern Africa. We must continue to resist Soviet
efforts to gobble up fragile countries, and by doing so turning these
countries into bases for the re-export of revolution--as they are
attempting to do now in Central America. We must be sufficiently strong
to block the Soviets from driving a political wedge between ourselves
and our allies--as they are attempting to do now in Western Europe.
And, at all costs, we must be so strong defensively that even in their
worst moments, Soviet leaders won't be tempted to let their missiles fly
in some sort of desperate, last-ditch gamble to destroy everybody in
hopes that they will emerge in control of the wreckage.
13. A strategy of denying the Soviets an external: solution to
their problem will generate support for a strong defense because it
offers the one thing people rightly demand for support of any
sacrifice: hope. Remember that by convincing people the Soviet empire
will last forever, Moscow's propaganda network has also convinced people
that the US-Soviet rivalry is a permanent feature of life on earth.
This, in turn, has led to a growing perception that all our defense
spending achieves nothing. They spend, we spend, weapons become more
and more deadly, and the cycle goes on forever; the chances inevitably
grow that something awful will happen, if not by design then by
accident. So depressing and so genuinely frightening is this prospect
that more and more people no longer have the will to face it, and
instead they turn toward silly and sometimes dangerous schemes they are
told will somehow break the cycle. In this category I would include the
idea of a nuclear freeze, and the various proposals floating around
that, in one guise or another, would amount to unilateral disarmament.
In despair, people forget the lesson that Paul Nitze and Dean Acheson
stated so eloquently back in 1950, in their famous memorandum, NSC-68:
"No people in history have ever survived who thought they could protect
their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies." This
strategy of denying the Soviets an external solution to their problem
will sustain and even generate support for a strong defense--not only
among Americans but among our allies as well--because it suggests that
if we can hold on for a while longer, the need for such sacrifice will
decline.
9
UNCLASSIFIED
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
14. Bear in mind that what I outline here is a strategy, not a
policy. It is meant to serve as a guide to the formulation of specific
policies, and as a foundation for those policies we choose. Should we
engage in ASAT negotiations with the Soviets? Should we seek a
summit? Should we put a new START proposal on the table in Geneva?
Should we sell them grain? How should we handle the leftward drifts of
Suriname and Guyana? No strategy can--or should--dictate the answers to
questions like these. Too much will--and should--depend on
circumstances of the moment and on our national needs and interests at
the time. A strategy of denying the Soviets an external solution to
their problem is a long-term venture, with zigs and zags inevitable and
even useful along the way. Flexibility is not an antonym of strength,
but rather a source of it.
15. In pursuing this 'trategy through the policy battles that
inevitably lie ahead, nothir:g will be more vital than a precise
knowledge of the Soviets' state of readiness and, even more important,
their state of mind. In essence, we need to put that country and its
various elites in a sort of intensive-care monitoring system. We must
do even more than we do now--which is a lot--to track the development
and deployment of weapons and troops, the state of the Soviet economy,
and the prospects for Soviet science and technology. And to an extent
that we have never done before or needed to do, we must track the mood
of Soviet elites--political leaders, industrial chieftains, military
figures, scientists, indeed all members of the Soviet intelligentsia.
For when all is said and done, it is the mood of these people--the
degree of their pessimism and their judgments of their country's
prospects--that will warn us either that the Soviet Union is preparing
for major reforms, edging toward a dangerous, "use-it-or-lose-it"
decision, or merely giving up and accepting its descent into history.
At the same time, we need to make certain that these Soviet elites
understand us more accurately than they have ever understood us up to
now--our military strength of course, but more importantly the strength
of our will to survive as a free people and our willingness to assist
them if only they will cease to threaten our own survival.
16. Let me give you some indication of how people will react to
all this. I have tried out my-proposed strategy on several dozen
political figures, journalists, Soviet specialists, and public-affairs-
minded friends and acquaintances. The professional doves reject my
proposed strategy on grounds that it requires continued high levels of
defense spending, provides a rationale for our current efforts in
Central America, encourages support for our Strategic Defense
Initiative, and in general points the way toward a post-Soviet world in
which the US would likely be the only superpower. The professional
hawks reject my proposed strategy on the grounds--so help me--that it
will be viewed as a godsend by the professional doves. As the hawks see
it, this perception of the Soviet Union as a declining empire will give
10
UNCLASSIFIED
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886R001000010007-6
UNCLASSIFIED
doves the rhetorical ammunition to defeat many of our current
initiatives. "For heaven's sake, let's not poke sticks at a wounded
bear. He's dangerous, so let's back off and do nothing--nothing--the
bear might possibly view as threatening," the doves will say. Or so
fear the hawks. My own view is that hawks and doves have been making
the same arguments for so long, and have become so proficient at making
their respective arguments, that these negative reactions are an
instinctive response to something new. On the other hand, there is a
school of thought which holds that any strategy opposed with equal
vehemence by extremists on both ends of the political spectrum is
probably just right.
17. One immediate benefit will derive from this long-term
strategy. 'It will help to dampen one of the most bitter and corrosive
debates that has ever'raged among Americans and among our allies, and
one that I fear over time will tear the fabric of our societies. On the
one side are those of us who want peace so badly that we are willing to
pay any price for it. On the other side are those of us who also want
peace badly, but who believe that peace without freedom would be
intolerable and, in the long run, violently unstable. With the strategy
that I have outlined here, this debate will peter out as people come to
understand that it is not necessary to choose. We will have peace. And
we will be free.
Herbert E. Myer
11
UNCLASSIFIED
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 .nniti7ar1 rnnv Annrnvar1 fnr Ralaasa 7(111/(17/18 ? rIA-Rf1PRRNAnnRRRR(1(11nnn 1(1nn R
10 J"
Ilk
Hon. William Casey
Director: CIA
Washington, D.C.
Dear Bill;
United States Department of State
Assistant Secretary of State
for Economic and Business Affairs
Attached is my reaction to Herb Meyer's recent piece on
Why Is The World So Dangerous?
We are presently all transfixed by':events in' Lebanon:,. But the
worst that is likely to come out of that mess pales into
insignificance beside what the Persian Gulf situation can
turn into.
At some point, the Soviets may-. provide the Iranians--on a
cut rate basis if necessary--with their versian of the
Exccets for use against tankers, and with Scud Bs for use
against oil loading facilities. And if that happens,
we are going to..have a real mess on our hands.
P.S. attached is a memo I recently sent to George Shultz
on this matter.
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886R001000010007-6
United States Department of State
SECRET
for Economic and Business Affairs
Washington, D.C. 20520
December 27, 1983
MEMORANDUM TO: Mr. Herbert E. Meyer
Vice Chairman
National Intelligence Counci
Central Intelligence Acyncy
You can well imagine after our conversation that I find
myself in large agreement with much of the picture that you
present in this memorandum. It is an excellent piece.
I would caution you on your conclusion, however. To
conclude from current favorable trends that the Soviets will
attempt something as desperate as nuclear war as their only
way to avoid prospective relative weakening and political
disintegration does their analysts a disservice.
Soviet analysts know that trends in Washington last only
as long as administrations. Our tougher bunch will at some point
be replaced by a more starry-eyed crowd, and then the Russians
may hope that the rot in the West will resume. New opportunities
may arise as happened during the Carter Administration in Iran
and Central America. The Defense budget may be slashed again.
The economy may suffer a new wave of inflation-and instability.
But I utterly agree with you that the Soviets will exploit
opportunities as and when they arise to weaken the West. And
in that context I say to you: Beware the Persian Gulf. There
lies disaster for the West if we fail to contain the spreading
hostilities between Iran and Iraq. There lies the possibility
of major war in which we could progressively become embroiled.
There lies the opportunity for the Soviets to provide weapons to
local belligerants who would sink our ships and block our oil
and so raise oil prices, abort our economic recovery and
jeopardize both our debt strategy with the Third World, and our
re-election prospects in'the United States.
bcc: Honorable William Casey
Director
Central IntelligertiZ
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886R001000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
NL).U t'-UN 'J.tI JYJ'1't;P7
SECRET/SENSITIVE
2 g ! fV :;83
TO: The Secretary
FROM: EB - Richard T. McCormack
SUBJECT: Major Conclusions from My Trip
Last Week to the Persian Gulf
I have just returned from a week in the Persian Gulf. My
major reason for accompanying Secretary Hodel on this trip was
the concern that hostilities could spread in the Persian Gulf -''
and knock out for a significant time much of the Gulf's oil
exporting capacity.
Prior to my departure, I had been visited by an important
Saudi Arabian Prince (protect) who informed me that Iraq would
launch air attacks against Khark Island and-Iran-bound shipping
within weeks, not months. The Prince was also very supportive
of this move, believing that it was the only way that hostilities
could be brought to a compromise conclusion. I'tried to convince
him, without success, that it was a far easier matter to escalate
a conflict than predict the ramifications that would follow.
This, however, appeared to make no impression on him--his over-
riding concern being that further Iranian military success would
result in a Shiite regime being installed in Baghdad, with
dreadful long-term consequences for the rest of the Gulf.
Upon my arrival in the Gulf, I found key people so pre-
-occupied with the prospect of Iranian attacks against oil shipping
and exporting capacity, that they did not once issue the standard
lecture against past Israeli iniquities. This is the first time
in a dozen visits to the region that no official even mentioned
Israel to me. They were all anxious to know how active the U.S.
would be in the event of Iranian actions, and urged us to consider
them reliable suppliers of oil. Oil Minister Yamani assured us
that there would be no nominal oil price increase for three years.
Sheik Zaid of Abu Dhabi, who was the first Arab ruler to announce
an oil embargo against the United States in the 1973 war, went so
far as to praise Egypt's Camp David diplomacy. When one studies
how little oil the U.S. now buys from the Persian Gulf, and how
this lessened demand has impacted on local developmental plans
and ambitions, it is very plain that Arab OPEC has temporarily
lost a lot of its ability to single out the United States for
pressure.
SECRET/SENSITIVE
DECL: OADR,
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
SECRET/SENSITIVE
As Sheik'5aid'said:*-"T5day`the Gulf oil exporting countries
need the United States more 'flian'tfie United States needs the Gulf
oil exporting countries."
The farther away from the region one travels the more one
hears the theory that Iraq is merely bluffing in its threat
to use the Exocets to persuade the Iranians to accept a compromise
peace. I found few serious people in the Gulf who believe this.
Gulf leaders are more inclined to believe that Iraq will
indeed use these missiles in an effort to shift the decisive
battle away from the front line, and to use financial pressure as
the critical weapon against Iran. If this happens, the logical
response of the Iranians would be to direct their efforts
against not only Iraq's remaining oil exporting capacity, but
also against-the oil exporting capacity of those countries who
are financially supporting Iraq. Iran has plainly threatened to
do this.
If we are initially successful in limiting the ability of
Iran to counterattack against Saudi and other Gulf exporting
facilities, there is no doubt in my mind but that the Iranians
will if necessary, turn to the Soviets for technical assistance
and hardware. In the early stages of any Soviet assistance program
the Soviets are not likely to provide pilots, or otherwise expose
themselves to a situation whereby an East/West-war might erupt.
But I can easily see the Soviets providing Khomeini with such things
as conventional tactical rockets or with other technical advice and
equipment to help Iran mount effective attacks on the oil exporting
facilities on the other side of the Gulf. Launching sites for
mobile tactical missiles are not all that easy to locate and destroy.
It is totally in the Soviet interest to disrupt oil exports
from the Gulf. Not only would this cause oil prices to rise
(benefitting the Soviet Union as a major oil exporting nation),
but this would also jeopardize the free world economic recovery
and our ability to manage the Third World debt problem.
In view of the high stakes on the board, and the potential
for escalation that would present U.S. policy makers with an
ever worsening series of choices, I recommend that the United
States put its full diplomatic power behind steps to stop the
escalation now, before the violence rises to ever higher levels.
We must first convince the Saudis and other Gulf states that
there are alternatives to safeguard their long-term security
against a future radical Shiite regime allied with Khomeini in
Baghdad.
We need to point out to them that if the war worsens against
Iraq, Saddam Hussein's Baathist colleagues are far more likely
SECRET/SENSITIVE
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886R001000010007-6
SECRET/SENSITIVE
to turn to one bf--their associates or-to some compromise candidate
to replace Hussein,. rather than Iet'Khbmeini march into Baghdad
and install a Shiite radical in his office.
Khomeini has already moderated his terms for reparations--from
$150 billion to $50 billion. This is still a fair piece of change,
but it indicates that the bargaining has already started on one
front. Khomeini's remaining demand, namely that S dd Hussein go,
can be taken care of by Hussein's own colleagues/e"things grow
more desperate militarily. Now it appears that the military
situation, at least on the northern front, is stabilized behind
a series of easily defended ridge lines. If that is the case, there
is no need for a sense of desperation on the .part of Iraq's
financial supporters that imminent defeat for Iraq looms.
My fear is that unless we move very quickly to corrvince-the--
Saudis and others that the situation in the Gulf could get rapidly
out of hand unless they exercise their financial leverage or.
Baghdad, the consequences could be tragic for the Gulf and the
world.
RECOMMENDATION
I recommend that you send a.very senior representative out
there very soon with this mission.
Drafted: EB:RTMCCormack:meh.
11/28/83:632-0396
SECRET/SENSITIVE
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886R001000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86MOO886RO01000010007-6
The Director of Central Intelligence
Washington, D.C. 20505
National Intelligence Council
NIC 8784-83
6 December 1983
MEMORANDUM FOR: Director of Central Intelligence
Deputy Director of Central Intelligence
Herbert E. Meyer, Vice Chairman, NIC
FROM : Hal Ford
.National Intelligence Officer At Large
SUBJECT : Why Is the World So Dangerous? An Alternative View
1. I want to second some of the alerts Herb has sounded, but disagree
with him about other of his alarms, and about a lot of the world picture he
paints in arriving at his conclusions. My differences are not just academic,
but relate professionally to how we should assess world developments most
accurately for our policymaking consumers.
2. Herb's think piece performs some useful functions in stimulating
intelligence officers (a) to avoid straight line projections in the belief
that the world will necessarily go on about as it has; (b) to be alert to the
possibility of a Soviet-initiated rise in the intensity of global competition,
and hence to the prospect of an especially dangerous possible period of world
history immediately ahead of us; (c) to acknowledge that the USSR's world-wide
network of CPs, agents, client states and groups offers Moscow considerably
greater opportunities for creating trouble than is often appreciated; and
(d) to entertain the idea that the USSR's vulnerabilities and disarray may be
substantially greater than has been generally acknowledged.
3. Apart from these considerations, however, I disagree fairly strongly
with a number of the propositions of the memo. Overall, it tends to pick and
choose only selected data, those which happen to fit the particular arguments
being advanced. As for specific areas where I disagree, the memo overstates:
-- The uniqueness of present violence in the world.
-- The possible degree of alarm on the part of Soviet leaders
in 1983, as compared, say, with their probable world view
in 1979.
-- Soviet causation of various ills in the world.
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86MOO886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
The likelihood that a significant number of Soviet leaders
believe that the USSR has had it, and is now terminally
ill.
The according readiness of such Soviet leaders to "go for
it."
4. Is there a rise of global violence? In the first place, it can be
questioned whether there is such a thing as "global violence." There are,
certainly, always many violent situations in train at any one time in the
world, stemming from countless causes. Secondly, there is nothing too
distinctive about recent months: there are many times in the past where a
number of disparate, dramatic events could have been viewed as a "sharp rise
in violence in the world." Certainly various years could so qualify: for
example, 1948-1949, 1950, 1963, 1968, and so on -- even Herb's own 1979 (i.e.,
Iran, Afghanistan, Rhodesia, the Nicaraguan revolution, the Yemeni war, the
China-Vietnam war, etc.). And, Lebanon's self-immolation did not begin in
1983. Thirdly, in selecting only certain violent events, what does one think
about other continuing bloodshed now: in Iran-Iraq, Timor, Spanish Sahara,
Northern Ireland, the southern Philippines, Latin America, and many other
locales? Are all these, too, the product of Soviet impetus? Fourthly, 1982-
1983 could have been picked for making a case just opposite to that of Herb's
memo -- that is, a time of especially unique non-Communist violence: e.g.,
the Falklands; heightened resistance movements in Afghanistan, Angola,
Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Ethiopia; Israel's armed initiatives in Lebanon;
the invasion of Grenada; and US, French, and Israeli reprisals in Lebanon.
5. Is 1983 so much worse a year than 1979, say, for Soviet leaders that
they have become despondent about the course of world revolution? Again, the
memo does not clue the reader that there may be offsetting data that do not
happen to fit the memo's construct. True, Soviet leaders almost certainly
have been frustrated by many developments in the last year or so, and
certainly most of all by the way the United States has stirred itself at home
and abroad. But are the Soviet setbacks as momentous as the memo makes
them? And are they so much worse, say, than in 1979? That year, 1979, was
itself no great shakes for Soviet leaders, given for example the then-recent
US recognition of China, and Soviet fears at the time of an impending US-PRC
alliance; NATO's INF decision and the nightmare prospect this presented Moscow
of Pershing II warheads ten minutes away; the sharply adverse worldwide
reactions to the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan, including China's cutting off
of what had been somewhat promising talks with the USSR; the necessity the
Soviets faced of having to repair their fortunes in the Horn of Africa, after
having been deprived of the good thing they had had going in Somalia; and the
beginnings of a,sharp decline in Brezhnev's health. Also, most of the facets
of Soviet domestic malaise that Herb's memo lists for 1983 were already of
great concern to Soviet leaders then, in 1979.
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
6. Are the Soviets indeed the source of all this recent "global
violence?" Here the memo is on shaky ground, in attributing to what it terms
a rickety USSR the capability to orchestrate the world's grief. Granted, the
Central American and Lebanon challenges to US interests are much the worse
because of the Soviet pressures back of the Cubans and the Syrians, and the
USSR certainly initiates and exploits much trouble the world around, including
-- in my view -- much more in the way of terrorist activities than we have yet
been able to document. But it's quite another thing to see some brooding
Slavic malevolence behind all kinds of disparate crises in the world. This
applies in particular to the memo's listing of the KAL shootdown: why did
these clever Soviets so botch their responses to that flight, both on the spot
and subsequently? And just what did they have in mind when they put the North
Koreans up to the Rangoon bombing? Did the Soviets purposely intend to deal
North Korean. fortunes a heavy blow? It cannot be excluded that the Soviets
planned the murder of Aquino, but what happens to the giant causation thesis
if we learn some day, say, that some of Marcos' (or Imelda's) own thugs
mistakenly thought they were serving their boss when on their own they did
away with their troublesome Becket?
7. The principal disservice the giant causation thesis performs does not
relate to these particular issues in debate between Herb and me, however, but
to the broad question of how best can intelligence guide policymakers to the
true state of the world, and to the true sources of that world's troubles.
Even if the USSR and the-CPSU did not exist, the late 20th-Century world would
be experiencing much violence. All kinds of people would still be killing one
another: Arabs vs. Arabs, Shias vs. Sunnis, Gemayel Christians vs. Franjieh
Christians, Arabs vs. Israelis, Southeast Asians, Palestinians vs.
Palestinians, East Indians, Irishmen, Africans, Iranians - Iraqis, and so
on. The root sources of world violence would continue to reside chiefly in
the forces of historic antagonisms,. unresolved territorial disputes,
dislocations of de-colonization, wide disparities in wealth, gross social and
political inequities, tribal and religious emotionalisms, distorted debt
loads, the sharp rise in the number of political actors, the increase of
literacy and education but not of opportunity, the gaps between expectations
and reality, the instant awareness of TV and cassette without accompanying
responsibility, the ready access to arms, and so on and so on. Certainly many
of these troubles are of greater danger to US interests because of Soviet
exploitation. But constructive US policy attack on the world's violence
requires that we address its root sources rather than settling for cursing the
Soviet darkness, and that we ask ourselves more often, "Just where do the
Communists come from?"
8. Is the outlook of some Soviet leaders now wholly bleak, and do they
indeed consider that the October Revolution is going down the drain of
history? Herb's memo once again raises only a partial list of
considerations. In many respects the future must certainly look unpromising
to Soviet leaders. But the memo does not mention many issues which various
Soviet leaders may feel will work to the disadvantage of the United States
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
over the long term, and so prevent it from reversing "the inescapable logic of
historical determinism." Mistakenly or not, Soviet leaders may well consider
that such issues include: the weak political base for US objectives that
exists in Lebanon;. difficulties the United States faces in increasing its
influence among Arab audiences; a United States identified with Israel but not
in control of its domestic and foreign initiatives; the strong hand the
Soviet-backed Syrians hold; the vulnerability of the US allies to any
diminution of Gulf oil supplies; the intimidating effect which the USSR's
strategic power and expanding military reach can exert in the world; the
security dependence of NATO on certain weapons which are becoming more
difficult political instruments for NATO; the growth of neutralism in Western
Europe, especially among the rising generation; the many difficulties the
United States faces in the Third World, and the existence of many Soviet
assets and intermediaries there; the not to be excluded possibility that
Central America and Mexico may constitute a long-term time bomb for the United
States; the absence of US foreign policy consensus; and the existence of
sufficient economic and sociological problems within the United States to give
Soviet ideologues confidence that a society with such "inherent
contradictions" cannot in the long run prevail over the more disciplined USSR.
9. US policy certainly must stay alert to the possibility that the USSR
is much weaker than has generally been acknowledged, and must develop improved
ways and means of exploiting such weakness to US and allied benefit. At the
same time, US intelligence and policymaking officers must keep that view of
the Soviet condition in perspective,. weighing it against the greater
possibility that the USSR -- rude, brutal, and crude -- is going to be with us
for years to come, continuing to present enormous challenges to US security
and policymaking. I would hazard the guess that the US-Soviet cold war may
still be confronting our grandchildren; that two world systems will still be
locked in competition a la earlier Islam-Christendom or the wars of religion;
that the Soviet challenge will not disappear as the result either of its own
folly or of the brilliance of this or that Republican/Democratic policy
initiatives; and that the reduction of that challenge will require a long
sustained effort; much acuity; much imagination; much consistent, measured
toughness; much diplomatic skill; much attack on the root causes of
vulnerability to Soviet and Communist exploitation; and -- not least -- much
in the way of taxes.
10. Will despairing Soviet leader "go for it?" We must of course keep
our watch up and our powder dry. But, the cruxes of Soviet -- indeed Russian
-- policy have been steady pressure, long-term outlook, and a fairly keen
sense of what the traffic will bear in risk-taking in each circumstance. The
bear is patient. His modulated pressures have paid off in many ways over the
decades. His leaders are not damn fools. Since Stalin the ponderous
bureaucratic necessity for consensus has prevented any leader or leadership
faction from getting too far out ahead on any dramatic new foreign policy
initiative. The Soviet leaders and the Soviet public know -- far better than
do we, for that matter -- what war on a large scale can bring to the
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
homeland. And, if the bear doesn't like the present US Administration, the
surest way some Soviet leaders can rally the American people around another
term for that Administration will be to "go for it" in some way, or to pull
off a coup of sorts within the Kremlin and embark-the USSR on a program of
greatly heightened aggressiveness in the world. In the near term at least,
the Soviets have got to sort out their troubling succession problem. In past
experience at. least, such periods have not given birth to aggressive new
adventurism, although we must of course watch that succession with extra care,
to insure against the outside contingency that some Soviet Strangelove faction
has not taken control of the USSR's destiny -- and ours.
11. What is the so-what of these alternative views of the world's
violence? The answer is one thing if the debate is just between two
intelligence officers. The significance would be quite otherwise, in my
opinion, in the event senior policymakers should subscribe to many of the
views Herb's memo advances. STAT
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
SUBJECT: Why Is the World So Dangerous? An Alternative View
Distribution:
1 - DCI
1 - DDCI
1 - EXDIR
1 - SA/IA
1 ER
1 - C/NIC
1 - VC/NIC (HM)
1 - VC/NIC (CW)
1 - All NIOs
1 - NIC/AG
1 - DDI Registry
1 - Chrono
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
NIC# 8640-83
30 November 1983
MEMORANDUM FOR: Director of Central Intelligence
Deputy Director of Central Intelligence
FROM : Herbert E. Meyer
Vice Chairman, National Intelligence Council
SUBJECT : Why Is the World So Dangerous?
1. The level of global violence has risen as sharply and as suddenly as
a child's temperature. In just the last several months we have seen the
shoot-down of KAL Flight 007, the assassination of Benigno Aquino, the
murderous decapitation of South Korea's leadership in Rangoon, the terrorist
bombings of US, French, and Israeli soldiers in Lebanon, the Libyan invasion
of Chad, and the anti-Bishop coup in Grenada that ultimately triggered our own
successful action on that island. What makes these acts of violence so
especially disturbing is their common denominator: each has hurt the
citizens, governments, or interests of the Free World.
2. Clearly, the world has become a much more dangerous place. We need
to know why. Are these acts of violence somehow linked, or traceable to the
same malevolent source? Or should we dismiss the present trend as a series of
frightening, tragic, but unconnected events whose one-after-another timing is
mere coincidence?
3. I believe the current outbreak of violence is more than coincidence.
More precisely, I believe it signals the beginning of a new stage in the
global struggle between the Free World and the Soviet Union. My contention
rests on a perception that present US policies have fundamentally changed the
course.of history in a direction favorable to the interests and security of
ourselves and our allies. What we are seeing now is a Soviet-led effort to
fight back, in the same sense that the Mafia fights back when law enforcement
agencies launch an effective crime-busting program. Let me concede right now
that I cannot prove this -- if your definition of proof is restricted to
intercepts, photographs, and purloined documents. Of course these things
matter. They matter hugely. *"t to truly understand an alien phenomenon like
the Soviet Union, one needs to go beyond a listing of facts; one needs also to
make a leap of imagination:
4. If four years ago the Soviet leadership had asked my counterpart --
call him Vice Chairman of the Soviet National Intelligence Council -- for his
evaluation of the global struggle, I believe my counterpart would have
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886R001000010007-6 ~" /%
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
replied: "Comrades, I'm delighted to report that the correlation of forces is
moving steadily in our direction." He would have cited the following trends
to support his upbeat analysis:
The US economy was faltering.
US defense spending was too low to truly assure the
nation's security.
-- The Soviet Union had established a mechanism for the steady
flow of wealth from West to East.
-- The Soviet Union had established a companion mechanism to
assure the steady flow of technology from West to East.
-- The Soviet Union, through the effective use of surrogates
such as Cuba and Vietnam, had developed a technique for
spreading its influence throughout the Third World by
targeting fragile countries, destabilizing them, and
swiftly taking over.
-- Through the massive deployment of SS-20s, the Soviets were
changing the balance of power in Europe.
-- In more and more countries, policymakers, elites, and the
masses were coming to accept the Soviets' long-standing
claim that time was on their side; that one needed only to
align with Moscow to be on the winning team.
5. Were the Vice Chairman of the Soviet National Intelligence Council
called in by the Kremlin's leaders, say in mid-1983, and asked for his
evaluation, I believe he would have sung a very different song: "Comrades,"
he would have said, "something has gone wrong. The US is refusing to accept
history!" Assuming our Vice Chairman were allowed to continue -- and this is
a bloody big 'assumption -- he would have cited the following trends to support
his downbeat analysis:
-- The US economy is recovering, with the only argument
focusing on the breadth and duration of the boom. (The
vice chairman, who enjoyed the privilege of access to US
business publications, could not understand their failure
to discuss the awes P, national-security implications of a
15-month, 64 percent Vise in the Dow-Jones Industrial
Average, combined with a lowering of the annual inflation
rate to less the 4 percent.)
-- US defense spending is up, with the debate in Congress and
on the campaign hustings focusing only on the proper size
of the increase. (The vice chairman had in his briefing
book -- but chose not to read aloud -- a letter Dwight
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
Eisenhower wrote to General Lucius Clay in 1952: "One of
the great and immediate uses of the military forces we are
developing is to convey a feeling of confidence to exposed
populations, a confidence which will make them sturdier,
politically, in their opposition to Communist inroads.")
The flow of wealth from the West to the East is less than
the Soviets had anticipated it would be by now. (The vice
chairman took a deep breath and pointed out that Moscow's
most audacious project, the Siberia to Western Europe
pipeline, had been literally cut in half by US opposition;
after all, the pipeline was originally to have comprised
two strands, and lately no one either in Western Europe or
the Soviet Union had even mentioned that second strand.)
The flow of technology from West to East is less than the
Soviets had anticipated it would be by now. In part, by
reducing the flow of wealth the US also reduced the Soviet
Union's ability to buy equipment and know-how. And the
US-led crack-down on illegal technology transfers had put a
crimp in that key effort. (The Vice Chairman thought sadly
-- but did not take the liberty of complaining -- that the
expulsions of roughly 100 KGB agents from Western
countries, mostly on technology transfer-related charges,
had wiped out the KGB's welcome home-party fund.)
The Soviet mechanism for spreading power through the Third
World, while still a considerable threat to Western
security, has run into unexpected resistance. Soviet
textbooks insist that anti-Soviet Third World insurgencies
cannot develop. Yet in 1983 there are five of them -- in
Nicaragua, Mozambique, Angola, Kampuchea and Afghanistan.
Thus Moscow can no longer target a Third-World country and
assume that no serious resistance will develop. Most
worrisome of all is the shocking setback in Grenada. (The
vice chairman bit his tongue to keep from pointing out that
the Soviet Union believed deeply in the domino theory --
and that one of its own had just toppled over.)
With, deployment now certain of Pershing Its and cruise
missiles, NATO is about to change the balance of power in
Europe back to its f vor. (The vice chairman had read in
Pravda that a P-II's41light time to Moscow was 12 minutes
-- which, he thought to himself, is roughly how long it
takes some of the Kremlin's leaders to get out-of their
chairs, let alone to their shelters.)
And most dangerous of all, by describing the Soviet Union
as "the focus of evil" US President Reagan has
singlehandedly deployed the one weapon for which the
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
Soviets lack even a rudimentary defense: the truth. (The
.vice chairman made a mental note to ask a friend at the USA
and Canada Institute how it happened that the Republican
Reagan had made good against the Soviets a threat made
against the Republicans by the Democrat Adlai Stevenson in
1952: "If you don't stop telling lies about us, we'll
start telling the truth about you.")
6. Whether or not such briefings actually took place, it's apparent that
by mid-1983 Soviet leaders had sufficient evidence to conclude that US policy
had fundamentally changed course, and was now moving in a direction highly
unfavorable to Soviet national interests.
7. From Moscow's perspective, the immediate danger would be the taking
hold of a perception among leaders and voters throughout the West, but
particularly in the US, that this new course was not only right but also
successful. Surely Western politicians -- especially those up for re-election
-- would chortle: "You see, we were exactly right to stand up to the
Russians. We are defending our own interests more effectively now, and it's
working." The inevitable result of this approach would be precisely what
Soviet leaders dreaded most: widespread public support for the new US course
and, therefore, a continuation` or even an acceleration of it.
8. If Moscow's chief objective were to knock the US off its course,
Moscow's most likely strategy would be to discredit this course through the
following tactics:
-- Raise the level of violence, thus making the world a more
dangerous place. (Keep in mind that US tolerance of
violence has declined markedly during the last 10 years.)
-- Attribute the increased violence and danger to the
inevitable result of reckless US policies. (It could be
safely assumed that members of the US media and other
elites would swiftly pick up and amplify this theme.)
-- Hope that voters will force a change of course, either by
replacing the incumbent leaders or forcing them to adopt
more "moderate" policies.
9. To implement this strategy, the Soviets would not need to commit each
and every act of violence thep elves. They would commit some, arrange for
others to be committed by sur agates or allies, and generally create an
atmosphere in which violence flourishes. This Vast element would be
especially fruitful, for there are always those who stand ready to murder for
one cause or another when the timing seems right.
10. Whether or not this Soviet strategy succeeds in the short term, I
believe the current outbreak of violence is a harbinger of things to come.
Let me begin with an assertion that seems startling, but that is accepted by
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
The Soviet economy is heading toward calamity. With an
average annual growth rate of less that 2 percent, and with
defense spending going up at an average annual rate of
4 percent, something fairly drastic has got to give, and
fairly soon. It's a matter of simple arithmetic.
Moreover, sharply rising energy costs will make even
current growth rates difficult to sustain. It is
inevitable that if present economic trends continue, living
standards will decline, perhaps to post-World War II
levels. We have all been warned by the experts never to
under-estimate the Russians' capacity for belt-tightening;
I myself have published articles on this very subject. But
there is a limit, and that limit is coming closer every
year.
The Soviet Union is a demographic nightmare. Today only
about half the country's population can speak Russian; for
an industrialized, technologically-advanced society, this
is intolerable. Moreover, so low has been the Russian
birthrate that in coming years the able-bodied working-age
population of the Russian Republic -- which contains
roughly two-thirds of the Soviet Union's total industrial
production capacity will actually decline. This is not
merely a drop in the growth rate; it is a drop in the total
number of warm bodies showing up each morning, drunk or
sober, for work. Moreover, high birthrates in.the Moslem
republics have begun to soak up vast amounts of investment
for schools, hospitals, roads, and so forth. Thus, fewer
and fewer Russians must work harder and harder to support
more and more non-Russians. This sort of thing cannot go
on indefinitely.
at least two dozen Soviet specialists and generally well informed individuals
I know, whose political views and affiliations range across the spectrum: If
the Soviet Union does not achieve its ambition to displace the US as the
world's pre-eminent power within -= very roughly -- the next 20 years, the
Soviet Union will never succeed. Among the analytic points supporting this
assertion:
The'Soviet Union has failed utterly to become a country.
After sixty-six years of communist rule, the Soviet Union
remains a nineteenth-century-style empire, comprised of
more than 100 nationality groups and dominated by the
Russians. There is not one major nationality group that is
content with the present, Russian-controlled arrangement;
not one that does not yearn for its political and economic
freedom. It's hard to imagine how the world's last empire
can survive into the twenty-first century except under
highly favorable conditions of.economics and demographics
-- conditions that do not, and will not, exist.
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886R001000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
-- The East European satellites are becoming more and more
-djfficult to control. Already economic growth rates in the
,key satellites are marginal, non-existant, or negative.
These rates will decline further as the Soviet Union, moves
to insulate itself from the rising costs of empire by
squeezing its.satellites harder, for example by raising the
prices of its raw materials and paying its satellites less
for the finished goods the Soviet Union then buys.
Economic trouble leads inevitably to political unrest, so
the question is not whether Moscow's difficulties will
mount but rather how bad things will get. We are all
familiar with the situation in Poland. But other
satellites may be closer to. their own political boiling
points than we realize. Romania has just announced massive
cutbacks in electric power, including the shutting down of
all schools for the month of January along with pressures
on consumers to stop using vacuum cleaners, washing
machines, and refrigerators. And in East Germany -- widely
regarded as among.the most stable and secure satellites --
the Communist Party daily Neues Deutschland, in an
astounding ideological departure, published in its
October 22 edition two letters from clergymen who expressed
their fears about new Soviet missiles. In all, it seems
likely that the Soviets will need to use raw military power
somewhere in Eastern Europe before too long; they may need
to use such power in several satellites at once.
11. The Soviet leadership simply cannot make the changes necessary to
either reverse these trends or cope with them. Kremlin leaders could boost
their country's economic growth rate only by slashing the defense budget or by
enacting massive economic reforms. Either remedy would threaten the Communist
Party's grip on power, thus neither remedy has the slightest chance of being
administered. The demographic nightmare is equally difficult to end. Moscow
cannot transfer industrial-production capacity from the Russian to the non-
Russian, and especially non-Slav, republics. Doing so would give these
republics more power over Moscow than Moscow is willing to risk. And Moscow
cannot import workers to Russian factories from Moslem republics because these
workers (a) don't speak Russian, (b) don't want to come, and (c) would be
bitterly resented by Russian workers, who would be required to share scarce
housing and food with individuals they view as racially inferior.
12. Two Kremlin actions { ovide a good measure of Moscow's domestic
impotence. To boost the birth rate among Russian women -- who average six
abortions, according to recent, highly credible'research -- the Soviet Union
has decided to offer Glory of Motherhood awards to women who bear large
families. And to reform the world's second largest economy, Kremlin leaders
just last month ordered the execution, for corruption, of the poor devil who
managed Gastronome No. 1, Moscow's gourmet delicatessen. These feeble and
pathetic actions are not those of a dynamic or even a healthy leadership
responding to national emergency. They bring to mind neither Roosevelt in
1933 nor Reagan in 1981, but rather Nicholas II in 1910.
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
13. In sum, time is not on the Soviet Union's side. This assertion is
now widely accepted among Western observers, as I've noted. But its
staggering implications have scarcely been absorbed. To do so we need to make
yet another leap of imagination, this one to consider the phenomenon of
thwarted ambition:
14. We have all known individuals who have come to recognize that time is
no longer their ally: the 45-year-old corporation vice president who realizes
that he may never make chairman; the 35-year old childless woman who lies
awake at night, listening to the relentless ticking of her biological clock;
the campaigning politician who has confidently brushed aside polls that show
him trailing his opponent by 20 points, and who now realizes that with just
two weeks left before election day, that lead may be too big to close. The
perception that time is no longer on one's side may take weeks or even years
to develop, and often it is obvious to others first. But by definition the
perception comes suddenly.
15. There are, in fact, just two ways to cope with the perception that
time has become an enemy. The first is to accept the unpleasant reality, and
to resign one's self to reduced expectations: life as a mid-level corporate
manager isn't so bad, there are advantages to not having children, it'll be
nice to leave public life for a while. This is quite often an. honorable and
perfectly sensible approach.
16. The second response is to go for it. That is, to refuse to meekly
accept one's likely fate, and instead to work or even fight for whatever it is
one wants. This, too, is quite often an honorable and perfectly sensible
approach. But it is a phenomenon of human nature that from the moment one
concludes that time is an enemy and that the proper response is to go for it
-- all is changed. Ideas and actions that were unthinkable the day before are
now quite thinkable and even appealing. Why? Because the alternative is
failure, and this is judged to be unacceptable. Ambitious, seemingly defeated
mid-level business executives who have taken desperate and daring measures
populate our corporate boardrooms. They populate our prisons, too. The
35-year-old single woman who conceives a child before finding a husband has
gone from a scandal to a national trend. And the history of desperate
politicians in the final days of their campaigns is the stuff of Washington
legends.
17. Now let us consider the implication of our assertion that if the
Soviet Union doesn't take the West in the next 20 years or so, it never
will: it means that if present trends continue, we're going to win the Cold
War. That is, the US will coMnue to be the world's pre-eminent power and
the Free World will both survive and flourish.
18. What matters here is not whether US observers believe this, but
rather whether our perception is shared by Soviet officials. No doubt there
.are some in Moscow who view the future with confidence. And probably there
are some who see trouble ahead, but who take an apres-moi-le-delu e
attitude. But it seems to me inevitable that some Soviet ficials --
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
possibly at the very top, more likely at the. third or fourth level echelons now view their. empire's future as bleak. And of those officials it seems
equally inevitable that while some will opt to'accept the inevitable, so to
speak, others will be less fatalistic. Their argument would run like this:
Ours is an unstable political system, held together solely by terror and
military force. Peaceful political change is utterly alien to Russia. The
alternative to moving forward is not standing still, but falling backward.
Thus when we lose our forward momentum and begin to suffer reversals, our
empire will crumble swiftly and violently. We who are the elite -- like every
totalitarian.elite that has come before -- will be swept away. And unlike the
elite that we swept away in 1917 -- so many of whose members wound up driving
taxis in Paris -- we will wind up swinging from lamp-posts in every city from
Leningrad to Vladivostok.
19. They could decide to go for it: to launch one or a series of actions
designed to change the correlation of forces before it is too late to do so.
In this category I would include a grab for the Persian Gulf, and possibly
even a conventional or nuclear bolt-from-the-blue first strike on Western
Europe or perhaps on the US. I do not predict these actions. I merely
predict -- and this is worrisome enough -- that to some Soviet officials such
actions may no longer be too risky to contemplate.
20. It has long been fashionable to view the Cold War as a permanent
feature of global politics, one that will endure through the next several
generations at least. But it seems to me more likely that President Reagan
was absolutely correct when he observed in his Notre Dame speech that the
Soviet Union -- "one of history's saddest and most bizarre chapters" -- is
entering its final pages. (We really should take up the President's
suggestion to begin planning for a post-Soviet world; the Soviet Union and its
people won't disappear from the planet, and we have not yet thought seriously
about the sort of political and economic structure likely to emerge.) In
short, the Free World has out-distanced the Soviet Union economically, crushed
it ideologically, and held it off politically. The only serious arena of
competition left is military. From now on the Cold War will become more and
more of a bare-knuckles street fight.
20. We should be optimistic, for if present trends continue we will
win. But we must also be.on guard, for it is all too likely that incumbent or
future Soviet leaders will not choose to await their fates quietly while their
empire completes its shattering descent into history. The current outbreak of
violence may thus be merely a prelude to the most dangerous years we have ever
known.
Herbert E. Meyer
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
 Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/15: CIA-RDP86M00886RO01000010007-6
NIC# 8640-83
30 November 1983
MEMORANDUM FOR: Director of Central Intelligence
Deputy Director of Central Intelligence
FROM : Herbert E. Meyer
Vice Chairman, National Intelligence Council
SUBJECT : Why Is the World So Dangerous?
VC/NIC/HEMeyer:lht (30 Nov 83)
Distribution:
1 - DCI
1 - DDCI
1 - EXDIR
1 - SA/IA
1 - Executive Registry
1 - C/NIC
1 - VC/NIC (CW)'
1 - VC/NIC (HM) Chrono
1 - All NIOs
1 - DDI egiscry
1 - NIC/AG