The Collapse of the Soviet Union

Conventional wisdom holds that the U.S. intelligence community failed to predict the Soviet Union's demise in 1991, presaged as it was by President Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, the deteriorating Soviet economy, the collapse of communism in east-central Europe, and the moves toward independence by several Soviet republics. As the BBC recently noted, "the Soviet example illustrates the problem that intelligence gatherers are great counters: they can look at missiles, estimate the output of weapons factories, and so on. But the underlying political and social dynamics in a society are much harder to read."

Indeed, in Western Intelligence and the Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1980-1990, David Arbel and Ran Edelist argue that the intelligence community often catered to the preconceived notions officials in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush had of the Soviet threat, producing a "rigid conceptual conformity between the analysts and the decision-makers." But former CIA official Douglas MacEachin adds that while the CIA did not forecast the breakup of the Soviet Union, it did "predict that the failing economy and stultifying societal conditions it had described in so many of its studies would ultimately provoke some kind of political confrontation within the USSR ... What actually did happen depended on people and decisions that were not inevitable."

Above, Gorbachev reads his resignation statement in Moscow on Dec. 25, 1991, before appearing on television to cede power to Russian President Boris Yeltsin and effectively dissolve the Soviet Union.

Vitaly Armand/AFP/Getty Images

 

Uri Friedman is an associate editor at Foreign Policy.

DR. SARDONICUS

9:57 PM ET

January 6, 2012

What, just ten?

You failed to mention many glaring errors, most of them of commission instead of yours of analysis: a sign of the intelligence community’s ongoing malignancy, since it never seems to learn from past errors.

Among them:

A plague of right-wing military and paramilitary coups that blighted countries in Central and South America (almost all of them), Europe (Greece), the Mid-East (Iran under Mossadeq), and Asia (Indonesia, the Philippines), and who knows where else American agents got away with? That set back democracy and human rights for decades, everywhere the CIA touched down with dirty cash and dirty tricks; and those outrages are ongoing as we speak (Honduras, Egypt).

But then again, the title to this piece should be The “Let us count the ways” Biggest American Intelligence Failures…

Protecting Nazi scientists (Paperclip) and just plain fascist war criminals and folding them into the American, European and Japanese geo-political elites.

Provoking (with black commando raids) but failing to forecast the N. Korean invasion of S. Korea. Failing to forecast the Chinese intervention during the Korean War.

Failing the stop the Israeli Bomb, the N. Korean Bomb, the Indian Bomb. Good, bad, indifferent: consistent failure.

Overblowing the Russian military threat for forty years and thus supercharging the military-industrial-waste complex. Among other ways, failing utterly to infiltrate the Soviet leadership with human assets, and to expose the successful Soviet infiltration of British intelligence with human assets.

Overblowing the threat from everywhere except where the trouble actually came from, immediately after the Soviet collapse.

Overblowing the Chinese military threat for the last ten years, and Japanese (?) for five years prior.

Importing drugs from South America to American ghettos, to drug down potential rioters and raise cash for dirty tricks abroad. Fueling an interminable Narco War in Latin America, once the “kill all the progressive populists” game wore out.

Financing, training and protecting the worst kind of Islamic fundamentalists until they turned on us: see “Mossadeq” above. Directly responsible for Islamic terrorism, since it had decapitated Moderate and Democratic Islam since before World War II.

Underreporting the strategic threat of climate change. Every strategic threat to America today is also an opening act of climate change.

In essence, you could say that there has not been a real enemy of the United States that the American intelligence community had not sponsored or strategically lost to, at one time or another during the last fifty years, nor the patron of a popular foreign democracy whose career it did not jeopardize, warp or terminate with prejudice.

With no end and no improvement in sight. But LOTS and LOTS of cash, truthspeak and new people with which to not succeed at in the future.

 

JMBELAN

10:35 AM ET

January 8, 2012

Let's work a little harder

How about the 10 biggest intelligence failures that everyone who reads the paper can't already think of?

 

WICKBAM

2:55 PM ET

January 12, 2012

surely

9/11 should be at least second behind Pearl Harbor, if not 1st on the list? How could the Indian nuclear test be ranked ahead of it?

 

ONDEN

5:34 PM ET

January 12, 2012

Among them: A plague of

Among them:

A plague of right-wing military and paramilitary coups that blighted countries in Central and South America (almost all of them), Europe (Greece), the Mid-East (Iran under Mossadeq), and Asia (Indonesia, the Philippines), and who knows where else American agents got away with porno ? That set back democracy and human rights for decades, everywhere the CIA touched down with dirty cash and dirty tricks; and those outrages are ongoing as we speak (Honduras, Egypt).

 

HECTORGREG11

8:25 PM ET

January 27, 2012

maybe a top 100 list

Lets not cut this list short by any means...the author can probably expand this list ad infinitum, but lets put a cap at 100. The world has seen our fair share of US intel mishaps and the world must be living under a bridge or in a florida rehab not to notice more of these lapses in concentration. The US has most likely swept under the rug countless numbers of these events, so there. Rant satisfied.