THE SOVIET BRIGADE EPISODE: LESSONS LEARNED

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP81B00401R000300010003-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 10
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 13, 2004
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: December 12, 1979
• Content Type: MF

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THE DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
WASHINGTON, D. C. 20505
12 December 1979
MEMORANDUM FOR: Bruce C. Clarke, Jr.
Deputy Director, National Foreign Assessment
National Intelligence Officer for USSR-EE
SUBJECT . Lessons Learned
You will recall that shortly after the Cuban Brigade crisis
abated, I told you that I planned to write a memo summing up some
of the lessons learned from that experience. Subsequently in a
conversation we had with the DCI, we advised him that such a
memo would be prepared. I have had the memo in draft in my safe
for some time, but my trip to the Soviet Union and a far graver
crisis in Iran caused it to rest there undisturbed. I believe,
however, that it would be desirable to get this to you and the
DCI before the issue is entirely forgotten and the memo grows
stale. As you will see, the problems raised by the brigade
experience range from those that are fixable by some minor
organizational adjustments and resource reallocations to those
that would require nothing short of a cultural revolution to
repair. You can start at either end, or at both simultaneously.
cc: Chairman, NIC
NSA review(s) completed.
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THE DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
WASHINGTON, D. C. 20505
MEMORANDUM FOR: Director of Central Intelligence
Deputy Director of Central Intelligence
Bruce C. Clarke, Jr.
Deputy Director, National Foreign Assessment
National Intelligence Officer for USSR-th
SUBJECT: The Soviet Brigade Episode: Lessons Learned
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1. Introduction
1. The Intelligence Community's performance in dealing with the
Soviet brigade issue was neither an instance of gross intelligence
failure nor an example of brilliant success. The Community's perform-
ance was, in fact, highly uneven: it did fairly well, though raggedly,
when the issue of Soviet ground force presence in Cuba was given a very
high priority and enhanced collection lead to a breakthrough, but its
routine non-crisis performance revealed serious deficiencies which appear
to have systemic roots in the way we go about the analytical enterprise
in the Intelligence Community.
2. Because of the acute political sensitivity of the brigade issue
and the apparently incurable propensity of the US government to leak,
the impression of ragged performance by the Intelligence Community was
exaggerated by highly visible and tendentious public interpretations of
interim intelligence findings which surfaced while continuing more
systematic efforts were still in process. Along with erratic behavior
in the policy and legislative communities, this contributed to the
general impression of incompetence conveyed by the US government through-
out the episode.
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3. For the purpose of trying to extract some lessons from this
experience, the Community's performance in dealing with the brigade and
related Soviet-Cuban military issues can be analyzed across three
dimensions: questions of resource investment and allocation; questions
of analytical methodology, organization and quality; and questions
pertaining to joint Community procedures and interagency allocation of
responsibilities. All of these of course interrelate and overlap.
Many of the comments that follow pertain to problems affecting the
Community as a whole; some, to NFAC or CIA alone.
II. Implications for Resource Investment and Allocation
4. In the first place,'it appears evident that many of the
difficulties -- illustrated below -- which the Community experienced
in dealing with the brigade and related issues reflected a much
broader resource problem which will cause us continued embarrassment
unless remedial action is taken. Neither procurement nor allocation
of resources -- in the Intelligence Community as a whole and in CIA in
particular -- have been appropriately modified to keep pace with the
substantial expansion of Soviet political and military activities in
non-Warsaw Pact countries abroad in the last five years. This is true
for both collection and analysis. In consequence, resources available
to develop and exploit new information about Soviet activities in lower
priority areas have proven particularly inadequate and have made us
highly vulnerable to surprise.
--It was also, of course, reflected in the paucity of
resources given to the Soviets-in-Cuba problem prior
to the summer of 1979 by such CIA components as OIA,
OSR, OPA/USSR, and DDO.
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*This was the single most serious deficiency in Community performance on
the brigade. While paucity of resources doubtless played some role, it
is likely that internal organizational interface problems were also involveX1
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5. Because of the meagerness of the total pool of Community resources
for coverage of Soviet overseas activities, these resources are transfer-
able only at considerable risk. When political circumstances have dictated
an extraordinary concentration of resources on a given subject -- as became
the case with the Soviet brigade in Cuba in the summer of 1979 -- this has
required stretching coverage of other important targets dangerously thin.
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--This fact was dramatized when an extraordinary temporary
surge in August 1979 had to be
significantly diminished ecause of competing requirements,
immediately after it had helped produce a major intelligence
breakthrough.
--Considerable diversion of resources in OIA and OSR was
also required during the period of maximum effort on this
problem in the summer and early fall of 1979. The strain
on resources of the Regional Analysis Division of OSR was
particularly notable because of competing demands, for
example, demands resulting from the simultaneous evolution
of Soviet activities in Afghanistan.
6. It is thus important that over the long term more resources should
be permanently funneled by the Community and the Agency into both collection
and analysis of Soviet activities abroad, so that the enhanced attention
now devoted to Cuba should not be allowed to set the stage for future
inadequate performance in some new crisis area now given lower priority. 25X1
Specifically:
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it is appropriate that
greater weight be given then heretofore to creating more
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Soviet involvement which are outside the 25X1
areas of the USSR, East Europe, and China.
--OSR should be assigned specific responsibility for tracking
Soviet forces (including MAAGs) throughout the third world
and in all distant Communist states such as the SRV and
Cuba. OSR should set aside dedicated organizational entities
and personnel for this task.
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--OER should be given specific responsibility to track Soviet,
East European and Cuban arms shipments to distant Communist
states as well as the non-Communist third world nations.
--Regional analytical centers such as OPA's Cuban Analytical
Center (CAC) are, in principle, a useful idea, even if CAC
has not yet lived up to its potential. In addition to the
suggestions for quality improvement discussed below, a
larger input of qualified Soviet specialists is needed for
such centers dealing with regions where the Soviets are
directly involved.
III. Qualitative and Methodological Shortcomings.
7. While questions of priority and sheer resources availability
weighed heavily, performance deficiencies experienced in working on the
Soviet brigade issue, since it first surfaced as an issue of interagency
concern in the Summer of 1968, reflect a much broader set of problems
of more universal relevance. The major analytical shortcomings of the
Community revealed -- in this instance essentially in NSA and NFAC --
certain established styles, habits, and methodologies which combine to
make the Community vulnerable to error of omission. The problem can
perhaps best be illustrated by singling out the principal analytical
shortcomings as they were encountered in the evolving study of the
brigade.
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to a brigade. Both the possible presence of a brigade
in Cuba and its possible location at Santiago would
have been suggested earlier by a review of old
F associating Soviet military personnel specifi-
cally wit Santiago and including references to a
brigade at that location. As it turned out the key
1968-1971 reporting was first retrospectively
discovered after the August 1979 collection breakthrough,
not by NFAC or CIA, where the files had not been checked,
buti
--Failure to conduct elementary archival research in good
time also impeded our ability to provide a reconstruction
of the evolution of the Soviet ground force presence in
Cuba from the missile crisis period of 1962 to the present.
Accordingly, our estimated dating of the probable origins
of the brigade or its precursor was. repeatedly amended as
old files were examined to the ultimate embarrassment of
the administration.
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8. While the possible organization, methodological, or cultural
reasons fort (poor performance with respect to proper interpretation
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not known, it does appear that on the NFAC side, shortcomings in
performance do reflect certain deeply ingrained deficiencies that are
pervasive and impact most strongly on the performance of the Office of
Political Analysis.
9. The heavy pressure exerted on OPA by multiple consumers from the
outside, reinforced by a still dominant current intelligence culture and
reward system on the inside, have 'cultivated an operational style which
emphasizes simple, short and quick quasi-analytical work at the expense
of developing skills, working habits, methodologies and expertise required
to perform more complex,-broader, sophisticated analysis. So pervasive
are these external pressures and internal institutional predilections that
even the CAC, an OPA unit established in large part for the explicit
purpose of promoting interdisciplinary research, has thus far not surmounted
them. Between August 1978 when the Soviet ground force issue in Cuba
became a matter of interagency intelligence concern until July 1979, when
the CAC was tasked to draft an IIM on possible Soviet ground force presence
in Cuba, no systematic research effort was made to exploit the Community's
archives in order to provide some historical context for fragmentary but
politically sensitive current intelligence evidence.
10. At least in part because of the current intelligence orientation
in OPA, there does not appear to be a common set of professional research
procedures widely employed by analysis units and no elementary research
methodologies established for analysts by OPA management to insure that
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when new issues or problems are unearthed, that past evidence and previous'-
analysis production on the subject are reliably brought to bear. The
absence of methodological norms and 'expectations appears to be more preva-
lent in OPA than in OER or OSR, which are more research-oriented. In
consequence, much of the relevant mass of data on political matters for
which CIA maintains complex retrieval systems at enormous expense is not
exploited in the conduct of political analysis at NFAC.
11. These problems have been compounded by others. Because of the
low priority assigned the Cuban-Soviet subject for a number of years,
the number of analysts working this problem who retain a memory of past
reporting and production on the subject has dwindled almost to the vanish-
ing point. This fact further reinforces the need for NFAC to establish a
routine methodology for the institutionalization of data retrieval. Such
a routine is important in all subject areas, but is indispensable in low-
priority areas -- such as was the Cuban-Soviet question -- where an
institutional memory may not be available to supply relevant (and in this
case, essential) background.
12. At the same time, until quite recently almost no Soviet (as
distinguished from Cuban) experienced political or military specialists
were allocated to the Soviet-Cuban issue, the principal full-time exception
being a lone OSR analyst detailed to the Cuban Analytical Center, where he
was obliged to cope with a multitude of demands. Thus a specific skewing
of area skills devoted to the question has intensified the problem created
by a more general insufficiency of research and drafting skills. This
problem should be attacked, as mentioned earlier, by a wider diffusion of
Soviet specialists in regional analytical centers.
13. Finally, our experience with the Cuba-Soviet problem has demonstrated
a need to habituate analysts -- in NFAC and throughout the Community -- to
express levels of confidence routinely in making judgements and estimates.
Otherwise, judgements which deserve low confidence are blindly inherited
and passed on by rote, sometimes for years, without due qualification.
Examples drawn from work on the brigade and related matters include:
--Estimates of the size and even the headquarters of the Soviet
MAAG in Cuba which by frequent reiteration and the atrophy
of caveats simply got to be taken for granted and not re-
examined. It now appears from examining old data that the
headquarters was mislocated and that the size of the MAAG
group may have been considerably underestimated.
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--Similarly the longstanding Community estimate of manning
levels for the Soviet SIGINT facility at Lourdes, described
--A key mistake in assumptions going back to 1963-64 was that
all Soviet ground force combat units had been withdrawn from
Cuba after the missile crisis. Retrospectively it is clear
that the evidence regarding Soviet withdrawal from Santiago
was never as clear as that pertaining to other locations of
Soviet combat units and that a more carefully caveated and
qualified judgement might have kept some residual focus on
the issue over the years.
IV. Community Procedural and Other Problems
14. Finally, further compounding the problems encountered have been
certain issues of Community allocation of responsibilities and Community
procedures.
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-'17. A second issue concerns the coordination process for interagency...
products. It became clear, in the course of coordination of the large
Soviet-Cuban estimate, the July small IIM on the brigade, and the September
Memorandum to Holders on the brigade, that the rules of the game hitherto
understood for such coordination contain serious latent dangers. One
agency, in the course of coordination, repeatedly demanded the right to
insert views which the remainder of the Community unanimously considered
not only unjustified by evidence, but also irrelevant to the issue immedi-
ately at hand and gratuitously inflammatory. It was only with great
difficulty that this Agency was ultimately dissuaded from insistence on
its right to have its most inflammatory contentions published as dissent-
ing footnotes, which under the circumstances could well have had severely
adverse political consequences. The issue is a sensitive one, bordering
as it does on the right of each agency to express dissenting views, but
it seems clear that serious thought should be given to clarification of 25X1A
the DCI's rights in such extreme cases.
cc:, Chairman, NIC
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THE DIRECTOR
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
Deputy Diroctor for National Foreign Assessment
18 December 1979
NOTE FOR: The Director
The Deputy Director
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Bruce C. Clarke, Jr.
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