Late in October the Senate Intelligence Committee was treated to revelations about Soviet deception of U.S. intelligence during the latter stages of the Cold War. According to Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John M. Deutsch, deception became effective because the CIA’s major traitor, Aldritch Ames, provided a complete list of CIA agents in the Soviet Union. Emphasis until now has been on the damage done when the Soviets executed many of these agents, cutting the CIA off from information at a critical time.
Now it turns out that this was the least of the damage done. The Soviets always tried to feed the CIA disinformation via double agents; as long as the CIA also had agents actually working for it, however, the doubles were unable to sway its picture of the Soviet Union—hence Ames’s value, not merely for safeguarding Soviet secrets, but even more for making it possible to pervert the CIA’s views. Readers aware of the famous World War II British double-cross game will find the idea familiar.
In the CIA’s case, there was another twist. For deception to work properly, the deceiver must control all sources of information. Otherwise the intended victim may be able to detect the deception, and even use that detection to reach accurate conclusions about the subject the deceiver is trying to hide or distort. The U.S. government did indeed have many sources of information other than the CIA’s agents, who by most accounts contributed relatively little to our overall knowledge of the Soviet Union. Many of the sources, such as signals intelligence, were not even under CIA control.
For purely bureaucratic reasons, those basing their conclusions on such non-agent evidence might well be expected to take on the CIA and thus to resist any disinformation ploy using CIA assets. For that matter, even the CIA had major sources of non-agent information such as satellite images. One question, then, must be to what extent the Soviets had sufficient knowledge of U.S. technical intelligence assets, such as electronic intelligence satellites, to include them in deception operations.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, as the technical intelligence systems flourished, human intelligence was denigrated. It was too difficult to acquire and far too difficult to use objectively. Admiral Stansfield Turner, U.S. Navy (Retired), for example, was notorious for drastic cuts in the Agency’s human intelligence side while he was the Director.
Then William Casey became director. As a veteran of an earlier era in U.S. intelligence, he was far more aware that human agents could provide insights denied to satellites, and that although those insights might be difficult to use, they were priceless. A recent history of the Reagan administration’s Cold War policy asserts that agent information, in the form of anecdotes concerning Soviet military industry, provided vital encouragement for policies, such as information control, that badly damaged the Soviets.
Thus, at least early in the Reagan administration, the new wave of human intelligence was both useful and dangerous to the Soviets. According to recent revelations, matters changed drastically after Aldritch Ames went over to the Soviets about 1985. When junior CIA analysts complained that the agency was receiving disinformation, their seniors apparently did not pass along these views when supplying intelligence based on this material to their Washington clientele. Their justification was that they knew that the Soviets were feeding them information, but that in order to make the disinformation plausible the Soviets had to include a considerable amount of accurate data.
A really sophisticated CIA, equipped with much non-agent intelligence firepower, could sift reality from Soviet-supplied fantasy, and thus could operate effectively despite the Ames- caused devastation. Mr. Deutsch felt otherwise. As a senior Defense Department official, he was among the victims of the Soviet scam, and he was clearly furious. He charged that the Soviets had managed to manipulate U.S. threat projections, and thus had caused economic damage on a very large scale, since the United States had spent billions on unneeded weapons. No list of such projects was published, but the press suggested that they included the new F-22 fighter.
Some skepticism seems in order. First, the claim that the CIA thought that it was so sophisticated that it could use disinformation to reach accurate conclusions sounds like yet another excuse for failing to admit that it was in deep trouble. When Mr. Ames was arrested, it was widely charged that the CIA had tried to avoid any admission of his existence for fear of embarrassment.
Second, it seems unlikely that the Soviets would have mounted a disinformation campaign designed to cause the United States to spend more on defense, and particularly more on better weaponry. There is every reason to believe that the Soviets viewed us as technological supermen, entirely capable of developing anything we wanted, perhaps even of bending physical laws. The F-22 may be more than we need, but that would not have comforted a Soviet fighter pilot facing one.
Moreover, the CIA’s power over U.S. policy is quite limited. The operational requirements that shape airplanes like the F-22 are based on assessments by the defense intelligence arms. One may complain that those assessments tend to overstate the threat, but they hardly are shaped by the CIA’s technical views. Indeed, the CIA has never had much of a reputation as a technological intelligence agency; its forte is policy analysis. It is possible that the CIA claimed special insights thanks to particular agents, but in practice such insights generally seem to have little effect on the procurement juggernaut.
On the other hand, the Soviets might have tried to direct U.S. funds into areas with little potential to harm them. During the 1980s, for example, some in Washington claimed that the Soviets had made significant breakthroughs in non-acoustic ASW, e.g., in using satellites to detect submarines. When the Navy pointed out that numerous studies of non-acoustic techniques had failed uniformly to prove that any such system was feasible, Congress provided money for new studies to the CIA, the honest broker whose views could not be compromised by the supposed Navy submarine lobby. Several years later it turned out that the CIA had found nothing, and the study died. One might speculate that the CIA fought to get the congressional funds because some of its own analysts accepted bogus Soviet claims of success in this field.
Although it might be argued that a successful U.S. non-acoustic system would have harmed the Soviets by making their submarines more vulnerable, it seems more likely that any U.S. belief in a successful Soviet non-acoustic system would have crippled the U.S. submarine force. Was the non-acoustic flap of the 1980s Soviet disinformation? We always knew the Soviets tried ASW experiments that we did not quite understand. Agents or emigres would have been of crucial value, and they could have been manipulated.
The Soviets probably were aware of an interesting kink in U.S. thinking. It was natural for the United States to seek systems that offered a high probability of success, but it must have seemed far less natural that near-term systems of limited effectiveness were almost always rejected in favor of theoretically better long-term solutions. Thus disinformation denigrating a current system (which might have been effective enough) could well have been intended to abort that system in favor of some far-off alternative. The Sergeant York Division Air-Defense (DivAD) antiaircraft gun may have been an example.
The weapon was designed to shoot down Soviet attack helicopters. Its difficulties stemmed largely from a requirement for range sufficient to deal with an expected longer-range helicopter- launched antitank missile, which in fact never appeared. From Dr. Deutsch’s perspective, the U.S. government had been led to pay a great deal for a Sergeant York replacement—which does not yet exist. From a Soviet perspective, the point of the disinformation (if indeed that was involved) was to abort the Sergeant York program, and thus to eliminate an immediate threat. Moreover, the range required of the replacement, had it materialized, would have added little to the U.S. threat to Soviet helicopters, since the original system’s performance sufficed.
None of this should bring into question either a Soviet desire to deceive or a propensity for disinformation. The compartmentalized character of the Soviet state was ideal for mounting disinformation campaigns since different elements of the system could be relied upon to take actions that, seen together, would give exactly the right deceptive impression, even if they made little sense to those carrying them out. It is much more difficult to carry out such arrangements in an open society, in which individuals may ask why they are expected to conduct themselves in apparently irrational ways. Over the past five years it has gradually become apparent that disinformation was a major contributor to Soviet victory in World War II.
The story does carry a delicious irony. There is every reason to believe that the Reagan administration conducted its own disinformation campaign against the Soviets, and that this campaign enormously helped to inflict the economic damage which brought down the Soviet system. Given the Soviet belief in U.S. capabilities, any plausible report of a U.S. project had to be followed up and, if possible, the program had to be countered.
Deception requires control of information. Early in the Reagan administration, numerous new programs were classified as “black,” i.e., controlled like intelligence sources. Many outraged observers concluded that the real point was to protect programs that did not deserve to live, such as the semi-stealthy B-2. There were rumors that some “black” programs contained elements which violated laws of physics. Money was shoveled into the black world, and there seemed to be little if any attempt to account for it.
There is another way to look at it. Information carefully controlled may be used to deceive. It could be assumed that the black programs would attract special Soviet attention. They would believe that the systems worked, that apparently violations of laws of physics were in fact something else. They would, moreover, try to duplicate the U.S. systems, at the least for fear that unless they did so they would be fatally outclassed militarily.
By the mid-1980s, it must have seemed to the Soviets that the United States was on the verge of two devastating advances: assault breaker and Star Wars.
Assault breaker was a nonnuclear counter to the armored ground forces the Soviets relied upon in the event of war in Europe. Soviet sensitivity on this point is demonstrated by the enormous effort expended to stop the neutron bomb, the U.S. nuclear counter to the armored forces developed during the 1970s. Star Wars threatened to neutralize the Soviet nuclear deterrent.
The Soviets had been confident that NATO would fear any outbreak of war, since its choices would probably be defeat by a powerful Soviet Army or devastation by nuclear attack. A Soviet Union confronted by these two systems would no longer be in any position to threaten the United States.
As it happened, in the mid-1980s the United States was in no position to make either threat real, but the Soviets never realized that. They failed to derail the Reagan programs by conventional political attack, telling any Americans who would listen that they could not possibly keep up with the United States—while Marshal Ogarkov lobbied hard for new Soviet programs to match the U.S. developments.
His lobbying may have been the crucial step in the downfall of the Soviet Union. By 1985 the Soviet Union had long been a highly militarized society. Military production represented a very large fraction, perhaps as much as 70%, of the country’s industrial output. Little margin remained, and it seems unlikely that Marshal Ogarkov realized how much he was asking. The Soviet economic system was ill-adapted to measure the burden entailed by the military.
Ogarkov was in much the position of Nikita Khrushchev a quarter-century earlier. Khrushchev wanted to modernize the Soviet military, using nuclear weapons, but there was no great margin for investment in the new weapons, and Khrushchev had to raid existing programs. This enraged both the military (Khrushchev ordered mass retirements of officers, shrinking the army to fund the new forces) and the military industry (whose managers were senior Communist party members, hence influential). Khrushchev’s initiatives destroyed him. It was no accident that the three anti- Khrushchev plotters were the Minister of Defense, Marshal Rokossovskiy; the party manager responsible for the military industry, Leonid Brezhnev; and the party ideologist, Mikhail Suslov, who was clearly aware of the damage done when Krushchev denounced Stalin. The plot was hatched at Stavropol, whose party boss was the young Mikhail Gorbachev.
Gorbachev was well aware, then, that Ogarkov’s demands could not be met by drastic cuts elsewhere in the military budget. He would have to find new industrial muscle by making the Soviet Union more productive. It seems likely that Gorbachev’s liberalization, his attempt to provide the Soviet Union with a more “human” form of Socialism, can all be traced to a desperate need to modernize the Soviet military machine— to meet a nonexistent U.S. challenge. We now know that liberalization brought down the rigid Soviet system.
Many Americans believe we won the Cold War by out- spending the Soviets; now they may suspect that the Soviets abetted the Reagan administration’s overspending. Both sides came close to economic collapse, but the Soviet system fell apart first. The reality seems to have been far more subtle.
The Reagan administration was up to far more than simply outspending the Soviets. Its proclaimed willingness to spend made it plausible that both assault breaker and Star Wars would soon materialize; that key aspects of both were black made them, if anything, more plausible. U.S. knowledge of just how badly the Soviets were stretched, provided by human agents early in the Reagan administration, revealed just how devastating the U.S. campaign could be. We now know that this conclusion was correct.
Wars, even victorious ones, leave loose ends. In recent years, considerable publicity has been given to the embarrassing consequences of U.S. support for the Moslem extremists who fought in Afghanistan, and who now resent the United States. Much less thought seems to have been given to the consequences to U.S. military policy of Cold War black program disinformation, now that the Cold War is over and the special security has done its job. Perhaps it is time to celebrate the subtlety and success of the program, and to open it up so that we do not deceive ourselves by believing the lies meant for the Soviets.