The Image of the Enemy

Intelligence Analysis of Adversaries since 1945

Paul Maddrell

• Editorial: Georgetown University Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781626162402
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: National Security

Intelligence agencies spend huge sums of money to collect and analyze vast quantities of national security data for their political leaders. How well is this intelligence analyzed, how often is it acted on by policymakers, and does it have a positive or negative effect on decision making? Drawing on declassified documents, interviews with intelligence veterans and policymakers, and other sources, The Image of the Enemy breaks new ground as it examines how seven countries analyzed and used intelligence to shape their understanding of their main adversary. The cases in the book include the Soviet Union's analysis of the United States (and vice versa), East Germany's analysis of West Germany (and vice versa), British intelligence in the early years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Israeli intelligence about the Palestinians, Pakistani intelligence on India, and US intelligence about Islamist terrorists.

These rivalries provide rich case studies for scholars and offer today's analysts and policymakers the opportunity to closely evaluate past successes and failures in intelligence analysis and the best ways to give information support to policymakers. Using these lessons from the past, they can move forward to improve analysis of current adversaries and future threats.

1

Soviet Leaders, Soviet Intelligence, and Changing Views of the United States, 1965–91

RAYMOND L. GARTHOFF

MARXISM-LENINISM POSITED an ineluctable conflict between the capitalist (imperialist) world and an emerging socialist (communist) world. That ideological framework did not preclude Soviet leaders from acting pragmatically, but it did lead them to believe there was an objective and historically determined underlying adversarial relationship. The conviction of successive Soviet leaders that they were on the right side of an inexorable revolutionary historical process engendered in Western leaders the counterconviction that they had no recourse but to accept the challenge of their self-declared adversary and engage in an imposed competition. There were unique features of the perceptions of each side, but most important was a feature common to both: a reciprocated image of the other side as an adversary and the attribution to it of hostile intent, fueling potential confrontation and a constant arms buildup.

This chapter examines the changing understanding of the American adversary that Soviet political leaders and intelligence services derived from their ideology, foreign intelligence, and interactions with the West during the final twenty-five years of the Cold War. It concludes that intelligence fared poorly in competition with other influences and sources of information and that, in the end, a bold decision by the last leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) to alter fundamentally the Soviet conception of international politics ended America’s status as the Soviet Union’s “Main Adversary,” to use the formal Soviet term.

The Cold War Setting (1945–64)

Josef Stalin, the Soviet leader from the late 1920s until his death in 1953, was strongly interested in acquiring intelligence information but highly skeptical about reported information that did not accord with his preconceptions. When highly placed Soviet spies in the British government and intelligence services in the 1940s and 1950s correctly reported that there were no British agents in the USSR, he doubted the reports and suspected that such valuable sources as Kim Philby were double agents. The foreign intelligence “Center” often dared not pass to Soviet leaders intelligence it feared would be unacceptable to them. Stalin harbored suspicions about his own intelligence officers abroad as well as about their agents, later purging a number who had served in the West during World War II.

American chargé d’affaires in Moscow George Kennan commented in 1946 on “the unsolved mystery as to who, if anyone, in the Soviet Union actually receives accurate and unbiased information about the outside world. . . . I for one am reluctant to believe that Stalin himself receives anything like an objective picture of the outside world.” Kennan noted that Stalin was subject to constant “misinformation and misinterpretations about us and our policies” from his advisers.¹ Stalin, of course, was responsible for this situation and indeed enforced it. Below the top political level, there were biases in collecting, selecting, and transmitting information to Stalin and his top advisers as well as competition among the several intelligence services and important elements of the government and the Communist Party.

Soviet intelligence, rather than moderating or correcting Stalin’s misunderstanding of the West, reinforced it.² Lt. Gen. Vadim Kirpichenko, a former deputy chief of foreign intelligence, notes, with particular reference to Stalin’s rejection of numerous intelligence reports warning of the impending Nazi attack in 1941, that “the leaders of the country had not required analytical information from the NKVD [People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs]. They required, so to speak, ‘fresh facts,’ without any working over or context. What we received from sources of information we reported without any commentary or analysis.” He notes that at that time there was not any analytical service in the Soviet foreign intelligence organization, which undercut the value of its intelligence reporting to Stalin: “In general, on the eve of the war the Soviet leaders did not accord our Service high State significance.”³ Indeed, the principal Soviet intelligence analyst was Stalin himself, who in the 1930s reportedly had said, “Don’t tell me what you think. Give me the facts and the source!”⁴ Despite Stalin’s bias, steps taken after the war built a still constrained but at least professional analytical capability in processing foreign intelligence, including in the departments of the Central Committee of the Communist Party concerned with foreign affairs as well as in the intelligence services.

From the early years of the Cold War, Soviet intelligence collection activities were targeted principally on the policies and plans of the main Western powers. Recruitments of Westerners declined sharply with the end of World War II, and wartime assets disappeared or lost their access to valuable information.⁵ Nonetheless, after 1948 Soviet intelligence built extensive new espionage networks in the United Kingdom and the United States, and in Japan, France, West Germany, and elsewhere in Europe.⁶ These efforts notwithstanding, there is little evidence of any significant contribution Soviet intelligence made to the basic understanding of the United States and its major allies held by Stalin and other Soviet leaders in the 1950s.

After Stalin’s death in March 1953, Nikita Khrushchev gradually moved into a leading position in the collective leadership that took power. Stalin’s successors shared his Marxist-Leninist worldview but showed a readiness to make departures in some areas of policy. Most basic was adoption in February 1956 of a policy of “peaceful coexistence,” holding that while the conflict between the capitalist and socialist camps would continue, socialism could emerge victorious without war. The new formulation was an ideologically sanctioned recognition of realism in the nuclear age. Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders continued to believe that Western leaders were hostile to the USSR, and while not inevitable war could still occur, so a strong Soviet nuclear and overall military deterrent was required.

The first East-West summit meeting in ten years was held in Geneva in July 1955. Although no concrete agreements were reached, the Soviet leaders gained confidence. Khrushchev was bolstered by a belief he had taken the measure of his foreign adversaries. He later noted that the meeting had convinced him and his colleagues that “our enemies probably feared us as much as we feared them” and that it was “an important breakthrough for us on the diplomatic front. We had established ourselves as able to hold our own in the international arena.”⁷ Ambassador Charles Bohlen believed that the Geneva summit led Khrushchev to conclude the West was not planning to attack the Soviet Union.⁸

Khrushchev’s aggressive diplomatic ventures owed nothing to intelligence. They resulted from his impetuous nature, faith in the political power of nuclear weapons, ideological view of world politics, and lack of understanding of the West. He gambled with nuclear brinkmanship in the Suez Crisis of 1956, warning Britain and France that if they did not cease their intervention, nuclear missiles could strike their countries. The Soviets had no deployed missiles capable of such a strike, and Britain and France called off their intervention owing to American insistence, not because of Khrushchev’s threat.⁹ But judging from indications in internal Soviet discussions and the testimony of his son Sergei, Khrushchev believed that his threat had led to the Anglo-French withdrawal.¹⁰

In 1957 Khrushchev’s attraction to the use of nuclear bluff and blackmail was boosted by the USSR’s first successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile and orbiting of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite of Earth. The alarmed Western reaction to those developments magnified the strategic significance of Soviet entry into the missile age and encouraged Khrushchev to seek political advantages from the promise of not yet realized strategic nuclear strength.

Khrushchev’s confidence became his nemesis in 1958 when he called for the Western powers to withdraw their military and political presence from West Berlin, convert it into a “free city,” and recognize East Germany. The ensuing political crisis, which lasted four years, ended with no change in the city’s status. Khrushchev’s failed initiative, which he had undertaken without seeking any intelligence advice on possible Western reactions, stemmed entirely from his overconfidence in judging that the USSR’s Main Adversary and its allies would acquiesce in a political defeat. If he thought he could play budding American concern about a possible “missile gap” to his advantage, the calculation failed. Although US concern about Soviet missile strength did grow during 1959–60 when Berlin was a focal point of American-Soviet confrontation and contributed to a sense of crisis, it became clear to all during 1961 that America actually had the lead in strategic missiles.

What altered Khrushchev’s view of America during the Berlin Crisis was not intelligence but his own impressions. Above all, his twenty-day visit to the United States in September 1959—the first ever by a Soviet leader—provided him with a partial corrective and broadening of his understanding of the United States. Upon his return to the Soviet Union, he publicly stated that President Eisenhower “sincerely wishes to see the end of the Cold War.” Khrushchev saw his reception in America (he received full honors as head of state even though he did not hold that title) as according himself and by extension the USSR equality with President Eisenhower and the United States, in his eyes reflecting a major advance.

Although the USSR’s Committee for State Security (KGB) lacked high-grade sources of political intelligence on the United States that could correct his misperceptions, Khrushchev sometimes benefited from concrete and verifiable intelligence information as he conducted his erratic diplomacy. Soviet intelligence obtained good coverage of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) planning, including policy discussions and concrete military plans for various contingencies concerning Berlin. For example, KGB chairman Aleksandr Shelepin was able in July 1961 to report to Khrushchev that NATO was preparing, with serious contingency planning, to deal with the Berlin Crisis as a military problem and was also preparing various sanctions against the USSR and East Germany. Stiff personal letters on US resolve sent by President John F. Kennedy to the leaders of Britain, France, and West Germany as well as follow-up actions by Secretary of State Dean Rusk were all intercepted and rapidly reported to Moscow. Also, an American sergeant stationed at the Orly Armed Forces Crisis Center in Paris was copying for Moscow all the NATO top secret Live Oak military contingency planning documents for Berlin, and there were multiple other penetrations of NATO.¹¹ At the same time, Khrushchev was, according to his son, wary and dismissive of intelligence reports from vague undisclosed sources and possible hostile misinformation, perhaps because he himself had authorized intelligence disinformation and deception measures.¹²

In some respects Soviet intelligence on the West played a positive role. Extensive Soviet and other Warsaw Pact espionage penetrations of NATO headquarters and NATO member countries throughout the Cold War disclosed much to Moscow about secret NATO political and military deliberations and decisions relating to a whole range of East-West relations. These disclosures conveyed the firmness of the Western position in a way that open Western declarations could not. They also provided evidence that NATO had no offensive plans for war against the Warsaw Pact (although Soviet intelligence remained suspicious that the United States had ultrasecret offensive war plans not shared with its NATO partners).

After the Berlin Crisis wound down and as the American edge in strategic military power grew, Khrushchev in 1962 undertook his most dangerous foreign policy initiative, secretly deploying in Cuba nuclear-armed missiles that could at least temporarily shore up the weak Soviet strategic missile force in the strategic balance with the United States. Once again he miscalculated, overestimating the chances that US intelligence would not learn of the action until it was a fait accompli ...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Achieving Objective, Policy-Relevant Intelligence, by Paul Maddrell
• 1 Soviet Leaders, Soviet Intelligence, and Changing Views of the United States, 1965–91, by Raymond L. Garthoff
• 2 The Stasi’s Reporting on the Federal Republic of Germany, by Paul Maddrell
• 3 “We May Not Always Be Right, but We’re Never Wrong”: US Intelligence Assessments of the Soviet Union, 1972–91, by Benjamin B. Fischer
• 4 East Germany in the Sights of the West German Federal Intelligence Service: Four Examples from As Many Decades, by Matthias Uhl
• 5 British Intelligence, PIRA, and the Early Years of the Northern Ireland Crisis: Remembering, Forgetting, and Mythologizing, by Eunan O’Halpin
• 6 Israeli Intelligence Threat Perceptions of Palestinian Terrorist Organizations, 1948–2008, by Tamir Libel and Shlomo Shpiro
• 7 Pakistani Intelligence and India, by Julian Richards
• 8 American Intelligence Assessments of the Jihadists, 1989–2011, by Mark Stout
• Conclusion: Intelligence and Policy, by Paul Maddrell
• List of Contributors
• Index