MISREADING INTELLIGENCE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000100240013-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 22, 2010
• Sequence Number: 13
• Publication Date: June 1, 1981
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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MISREADING
INTELLIGENCE
FOREIGN POLICY
Summer 1981
by Les Aspin
It is not enough to cite Winston Churchill's
epigram that the Soviet Union is a "riddle
wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." The
truth is that the United States has not properly
focused its intelligence and analysis efforts.
Intelligence analysts have an aversion to
studying Soviet intentions and pr iorities-and
understandably so. Most of the data on
intentions-documents, speeches, and human
intelligence reports-are necessarily soft.
Technical collection, however, supplies hard
data. The technical profile of a missile in test
flight can be clearly inferred from telemetry.
But what does a speech by Soviet President
Leonid Brezhnev mean? Can it be trusted?
Why was it delivered? What is the significance
of an article in a Soviet military journal? What
if its conclusions are contradicted by another
article in another, or even the same, journal?
Intelligence analysts like to have a high degree
of confidence in their findings; th,.y like to
maintain credibility within the bureaucracy.
They are, therefore, wary of advancing conclu-
sions based on other than hard information.
For this reason, the intelligence community
has focused on Soviet capabilities rather than
intentions. The United States can answer de-
tailed questions about Soviet technical capabili-
ties, e.g., the range, accuracy, and payload of
Soviet weapons systems. But next to nothing is
known about what is going on inside Soviet
heads.
If such a void of knowledge were ever accept-
able, it certainly is not today. When Soviet
forces posed no clear threat to U. S. forces, the
United States could live with misestimates of
Soviet intentions; in an era when they do pose
such a threat, it cannot. Only a mixture of hard
and soft intelligence can improve U.S. un-
derstanding of Soviet strategic intentions.
Three vital areas need attention. First, the
United States must improve its forecasting of
Soviet strategic plans. Misunderstood Soviet
priorities have been at the heart of some of the
worst 'misestimates of Soviet forces in the past.
SALT II would have given the United States
LES ASPIN (D.-Wisconsin) is a member of the Howe
Armed Services Committee and served on the. Hoorn
Select and Permanent Select Committees on Intelligence,
1974-1981. .. .
advance notice ot the numchcal size of Soviet
strategic forces. If the United States is entering
an era without SALT, with no treaty to make
Soviet deployment priorities predictable, the
gross misestimates of the past could reappear
with even more perilous consequences. STAT
Second, the United States needs a basis for I
devising negotiating strategies. Without a
better understanding of the Soviet Union, the
United States is very likely to miss opportuni-
ties and waste time in arms control. U, S. nego-
tiating strategy will necessarily consist of offer-
ing proposals with little idea of their potential
success.
Third, better intelligence is needed for
developing U.S. strategic forces. More than
ever, the United States must develop weapons
with future Soviet capabilities in mind, and to
do so, it must have a better understanding of
Soviet plans. To determine what sorts of intel-
ligence measures are needed, past intelligence
errors must first be analyzed.
Mirror-Imaging
. There is a widespread perception in the
United States that throughout the postwar
period the United States has consistently
underestimated Soviet offensive capabilities.
Alternatively, some contend that underestima-
tions resulted from a naive belief in benign
Soviet policy or from a misreading of the
volume of resources Moscow was willing to
devote to defense.
But a review of past estimates reveals that
these were not the errors. Rather, the U. S.
mistake was in the assumptions made about
how the Soviet Union would allocate its
defense spending. The problem repeatedly was
"mirror-imaging," or the assumption that the
Soviets would choose to expand their nuclear
forces in the same way the United States had
expanded its own. Thus:
? In the mid-1950s, Air Force intelligence
predicted the Soviets would deploy 600-700
long-range bombers in-.order: to ,reach' the
ultimate target, the United States. Instead; it
later transpired that the Soviets were more con-
cerned about targeting , Western Europe and
Turkey-and.the U.S. B-47 bombers stationed
there-not American population centers. The
Soviets therefore devoted most of their produc-
tion capacity to a medium-range force.
? In the late 1950s, some sections of U.S.
intelligence predicted a massive Soviet effort to
deploy intercontinental ballistic missiles
(ICBMs) capable of reaching the United States.
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Again U.S. intelligence misunderstc Soviet
strategic priorities, which stressed medium-
and intermediate. range, not long-range mis-
su e-7.
? In the mid-1960s, there was another
bombshell. After 1965 the Central Intelligence
Agency expected''the-USSR to follow-in U.S.
footsteps by:adding-amore. warheads-to each
missile. This measure,would be' more- cost ef.
fective and more attractive-to the Soviets than'-:
a quantituiveexpansion. of their ?iniisilerforce:
The CIA also assumed that the Soviet Union
would devote a large portion of its resources to
the construction of an anti-ballistic missile
system (ABM). Instead, the Soviets concen-
trated on ICBMs and did not deploy a multiple
independently- targetable re-entry vehicle .. .
(MIRV) until 1974. Members of the U.S. SALT
I negotiating team now believe that a unique
opportunity was missed to limit or ban MIRV
deployment-a restriction that would have'
contributed greatly to national security and
strategic stability.
This pattern of understanding Soviet capa-
bilities in weapon production but consistently
misunderstanding Soviet intentions in weapon
acquisition also plants a bureaucratic bomb-
shell inside the American decision-making
system. Every rival group within the system---
th,e bomber pilcts, the fighter jockeys,- the
rnissilemen, and the carrier admirals--pro-
duces its own interpretation of Soviet'behavior
to justify its claim for more money. Although
a more coherent understanding of the Soviet
Union cannot prevent bureaucratic infighting,
it could help the president ride herd on unruly
subordinates and steer clear of contradictory', policies.
TLe Search for Clues
For more than two decades, America has col-
lected intelligence on Soviet strategic weapons -
systems. Analysts scan this raw information
for its current intelligence value. After incorpo-
''much of the controversy by recovering data
from back files or by turning to sources that
had long been available but never exploited.
Misunderstood Soviet priorities
have been at the heart of some of
the.,worst( m1se8tinaate :of` Soviet
forces irr:the past.
Retrospectiveanalysis-will always "turn tip
more information than expected. Technical
intelligence methods, such as photoreconnais.
sance and signal intelligence, require knowing
what-.things to look- for. If an analyst is not
looking for a particular clue amid thousands of
bits of information, he will not find it. Thus,
information judged insignificant at the time it
was gathered, but now potentially valuable,
lies in the back files of intelligence agencies.
Having proven that they can conduct useful
selective retrospective studies, U.S. intelli-
gence-agencies now ought to use back files for
a comprehensive retrospective analysis.
The United States knows today the results of
Soviet decisions made in the 1960s, which
could then only be guessed-often- incorrectly.
Analysts should now go back and find the pre-
liminary evidence of subsequent Soviet ac-
tions. Knowing the sorts *of clues that would'
have produced more accurate predictions in the
1970s, intelligence analysts could look for simi-
lar clues to improve predictions of Soviet ac-
tions in the 1980s. Hard data would comple-
ment soft data in identifying Soviet intentions.
For example,.a strategic nuclear weapon
takes 10-20 years'to proceed from development
to deployment. The nuances of each step of
this cycle are very likely to be overlooked in the
vast accumulation of -technical intelligence
data. Yet the USSR has now gone through two
complete cycles,.of _modern ICBM programs.
The United States has mountains of data on
these?cycles. A thorough re-examination of this
-
:rating,.the select informatiorris~the National'xz',' '' data would-agive> the->United- Stateslalmuch` 11
(NIE)~ of~thst~year, the '' . '` er,idea= of;what~-earl`indicators~'I f ICBM'
Intelligence+Estimate '?"
., original data are filed away. An analyst-today- - '
wishing to review Soviet weapons development'^ , '
has ready. access only - to the finished NIES,
many of which are now known to be in error.
The CIA has occasionally engaged in a de-
tailed historical analysis. One example was its
1975=1978 study of Soviet civil defense. For`
years policy makers had shown no interest in
the topic, and intelligence estimates'ignored'it.
When Soviet civil defense became a political
issue, the intelligence community -resolved
_ ;; development look-like. Analysts would become
-(.,.better,~.equipped- to- discern: Sovietr,strategic'?
developments in the masses of data now-being
collected.
From a retrospeetive analysis some conclu-
sion s about how the Soviets make strategic
decisions would emerge and would help the
United States deal with the following crucial
questions:.
How much of what the Soviets say about' _
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strategic issues in speeches, articles, and public
statements should be taken seriously?-To look
back and see which statements-delivered by
what official, when, through what medium,
and to what audience-told the truth about
Soviet weapons development would provide
insight into the Soviet political process and
would suggest what statements should be taken
into account in future forecasts.
? What are Soviet decision-making proce- '
dures for different classes of weapons? The
answer would aid U.S. decision makers in cal-
culating when Soviet leaders are most likely to
be in a position to respond to U.S. initiatives in
arms control or arms escalation. It would help
intelligence analysts anticipate new or im-
proved weapons. It would also inform weapons
designers how rapidly the Soviets tend to re-
spond to improvements in U.S. forces.
? How do the Soviets incorporate new tech-
nology into their weapons? Is there a techno-
logical freeze at an early stage in the design
process, or does the Soviet Union-like the
United States-. add design improvements
along the way? Just a few years ago, U. S. intel-
ligence predicted that the Soviets would not
have accurate ICBMs until the mid- td late-
1980s; the prediction was recently revised to
the early- to mid-1980s. The initial prediction
assumed that the Soviets would build a totally
new missile before deploying new guidance
systems. However, the Soviets have begun
installing new guidance systems in existing
SS-18 and SS-19 missiles. A retrospective
analysis might have found that this sort of
improvement is common in Soviet weapons
development and thus prevented the error.
? How do political events shape weapons
programs? A systematic examination of the
past could help U. S. policy makers understand
the relationship between international rela-
tions, internal politics, and weapons develop-
ment in the Soviet Union. Did the 1962 Cuban
missile crisis touch off the Soviet weapons
build-up of the 1960s and 1970s, as some
historians suggest? Or did the Soviet armament
program have earlier origins? If the Cuban
crisis did trigger the program, then the United
States knows something about the long-term
consequences of brinksmanship. Did Khru-
shchev handle his political troubles in the early
1960s by throwing more money to the military,
and did Khrushchev's successors do the same?
Answers would suggest how future crises of
regime and succession in the USSR may affect
the Soviet defense budget.
To be sure, retrospective analysis cannot
eliminate all uncertainty regarding questions as
fundamental as the politics of weapons deci-
sions. But it can establish a firm framework for
judging those questions by using the available
evidence as systematically and comprehen-
sively as possible. Such a framework could
raise the strategic debate above the current
level of aggressive speculation. Fundamental
disagreement over Soviet strategic intentions
would undoubtedly remain, but U. S. leaders
would at least have a foundation of data on
which to evaluate competing hypotheses.
It is important to remember that intelligence
agencies are by no means the sole source of
intelligence. Many of the intelligence com-
munity's problems stem from the weakened
condition of Soviet studies in U.S. universities.
The few Russian linguists available to study
the enormous body of literature at hand often
face unemployment because the United States
has not managed to use them effectively. The
linguist shortage is even more pronounced for
non-Russian languages spoken in the Soviet
Union. The creation of a government-sup-
ported research institute on the Soviet Union is
a proposal worth considering. The United
States should also do a better job of tapping
the wealth of knowledge available from the
thousands of former Soviet citizens who have
immigrated to this country.
Leslie H. Gelb, former director of the State
Department's Bureau of Politico-Military Af-
fairs, has suggested that regular contacts be
established between senior U.S. and Soviet
officials, in addition to the diplomatic contacts
they now have. Such meetings would enable
senior officials on both sides to obtain a direct,
personal appreciation of the men whose actions
often influence their own.
Finally, while the physical volume of data is
probably largest on strategic forces, the United
States faces the same kind of difficulties in
understanding Soviet intentions in other
areas-such as the projection of force outside
their borders-where collected data has never
been subjected to comprehensive review. The
United States should undertake the same kind
of retrospective study in each important area of
superpower relations. But the strategic area is
where the United States needs most urgently
the answers that a retrospective analysis of past
Soviet intentions and actions can provide.
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