The Craft of Intelligence (21 page)

There must be intelligence analysis on each and every country where our interests may be affected, as well as in specified fields of particular intelligence interest; for example, the Soviet achievements in the fields of nuclear physics, ballistics, aerodynamics and space; also in industry, agriculture, and transportation. Naturally, the political, economic and social situations of many countries may also be of significance. I recall that once I had to have quickly a massive amount of information about Greenland. Within a matter of minutes, there was laid before me a study of the geography, geology, climate, peoples and history of that little-visited area.

All this is by no means just a question of automation, of filing away old reports and pushing the right buttons and getting the answers. Automation is a help and speeds up the process. But as we move further into the age of scientific achievement, the complicated machines and scientific-detection devices require the greatest sophistication on the part of the operators and analysts. Without this, our scientifically produced information as well as that furnished by the tools of espionage would be of little use. For it is the patient analyst who arranges, ponders, tries out alternate hypotheses and draws conclusions. What he is bringing to the task is the substantive background, the imagination and originality of the sound and careful scholar.

The analyst has sometimes been described as the man who takes forty-nine documents and from them produces a fiftieth. He does not do this by combining all the others, condensing and summarizing them, but by comparing them for their similarities and contradictions and shaking them down until he has sorted out what is probably true and significant, what is probably true but insignificant, and what is doubtful. He is, in a sense, finding out from the mass of unanalyzed information at hand, what we really know with some surety and what its value is, and what we don’t know. He must bring to this task an impartiality that cannot be influenced by the fact that on the one hand lives may have been risked to procure the information, or that, on the other hand, the “customers” in the intelligence community will be more satisfied to receive full answers to their questions than the available fragments that only answer part of their questions.

A single report, for example, on a technical installation somewhere behind the Iron Curtain may have been entitled by the intelligence officer responsible for the area, “Production of Fighter-Bombers at Plant X.” At headquarters, however, comparing this report with others on the same subject from a variety of sources, the analysts may find that some reference to metallurgical problems in the construction of a new rocket is the one valuable item in the whole report and that the main body of it, consisting of statistics on aircraft productions, is inaccurate or perhaps out of date. The latter part will therefore be shelved and the minute item on the rocket may alone find its way into that “fiftieth” document where it will be clearly ticketed as “untested” or “of unknown reliability,” and will remain so designated until further information from other sources confirms the truth of it or shows it to be in error or possibly the figment of some agent’s imagination.

There are knowable things which happen to be unknown. Sometimes they are easy, sometimes very difficult, to find out about. But there also are matters you cannot surely find out about at all. In such cases, if the requirement for a reasoned guess is high enough, we enter another phase of intelligence work—that of estimating. You make estimates not only about the knowable things that are not obvious, you make estimates also about those things which are literally unknowable, as we shall see.

Here is an unsung and perhaps unspectacular part of intelligence work, but I have often seen spectacular results emerge from it when our intelligence analysts are called upon to produce the estimate that the policymaker requires.

Some estimates are requested by senior policy officers of government to guide them in dealing with problems before them or to get an idea of how others may react to a particular line of action we may be considering. Others are prepared on a regularly scheduled basis, as, for example, the periodic reports on Soviet military and technical preparations. Before some estimates are prepared, a hurry-up call is sent to those who collect the intelligence to try to fill certain gaps in the information required for a complete analysis of a problem. Such gaps might be in the military or economic information available, or in our knowledge of the intentions of a particular government at a particular time.

Finally, estimates are often prepared because some member of the intelligence community feels that a certain situation requires attention. The cloud in the sky may be no bigger than a man’s hand, but it may portend the storm; and it is the duty of intelligence to sound an alarm before a situation reaches crisis proportions. While the charge is sometimes made that intelligence has failed to warn of some crises, the press and outsiders do not know the number of times that it has given the necessary warning because this, again, is one of the sides of intelligence that is not advertised.

One general range of subjects that receives constant attention and very frequent, regular estimates is the development of what we call military hardware, particularly by the Soviet Union. This means Soviet programs and progress in missiles, nuclear warheads, nuclear submarines, advanced type of aircraft and anything that might approach a breakthrough in any of the sectors of this field, as well as in the field of space. This is one of the most difficult tasks which faces the intelligence estimator.

Here one has to deal with Soviet capabilities to produce a given system, the role assigned to the system by the military and its true priority in the whole military field. It is always difficult to predict how much emphasis will be given to any particular system until the research and development stage has been completed, the tests of effectiveness have been carried out and the factories have been given the order to proceed with actual production. As long as a Soviet system is still in its early stages, our estimates will stress capabilities and probable intentions; as hard facts become available, it is possible to give an estimate of the actual programming of the system.

In 1954, for example, there was evidence that the Soviet Union was producing long-range intercontinental heavy bombers comparable to our B-52s. At first, every indication, including the 1955 fly-by I have described, pointed to the conclusion that the Russians were adopting this weapon as a major element of their offensive strength and planned to produce heavy bombers as fast as their economy and technology permitted. An estimate of the build-up of this bomber force over the next few years was called for by the Defense Department and supplied by the intelligence community. It was based on knowledge of the Soviet aircraft-manufacturing industry and the types of aircraft under construction, and included projections concerning the future rate of build-up on the basis of existing production rates and expected expansion of industrial capacity. There was hard evidence of Soviet capability to produce bombers at a certain rate if they so desired. At the time of the estimate, the available evidence indicated that they did so desire, and intended to translate this capability into an actual program. All this led to speculation in this country as to a “bomber gap.”

Naturally, intelligence kept a close watch on events. Production did not rise as rapidly as had seemed likely; evidence accumulated that the performance of the heavy bomber was less than satisfactory. At some point, probably about 1957, the Soviet leaders apparently decided to limit heavy bomber production drastically. The bomber gap never materialized. This became quite understandable, as evidence of progress in the Russian intercontinental missile program was then appearing and beginning to cause concern. Thus, while previous estimates of
capability
in bomber production remained valid, policy changes in the Soviet Union necessitated a new estimate on our part as to future development of the heavy bomber.

Intentions can be modified or policies reversed, and intelligence estimates dealing with them can rarely by unqualified. Witness how, just recently, our own intentions concerning the Skybolt missile have changed and how this must affect the calculations of Soviet intelligence.

The Soviet missile program, like that of the heavy bomber, had various vicissitudes. The Soviets saw early, probably earlier than we did, the significance of the missile as the weapon of the future and the potential psychological impact of space achievements. They saw this even before it was clear that a nuclear warhead could be so reduced in weight and size as to be deliverable over great distances by the big boosters which they correctly judged to be within the range of possibility. Given their geographical situation—their strategic requirements differ from ours—they soon realized that even a short-or medium-range missile would have great value in their program to dominate Europe.

The origins of the program go back to the end of World War II, when the Soviet Union, having carefully followed the progress made by the Germans with their V-1 and V-2 missiles, made every effort to gather together as much of the German developmental hardware and as many German rocket experts as they could get their hands on while they were conquering Eastern Germany. The Soviets also hired a considerable number of German experts in addition to those they seized and forcibly deported.

It would be a mistake, however, to credit their missile proficiency today largely to the Germans. The Russians themselves have a long history in this field and developed high competence quickly. They never took the Germans fully into their confidence but pumped them dry of knowledge, kept them a few years at the drawing boards and away from the testing areas, and then sent most of them back home. While these people proved to be a useful source of intelligence to the West, they had never been brought into contact with the actual Soviet development and could tell little beyond what they had themselves contributed.

In the early postwar years there was a good deal of skepticism in the United States about the future of guided missiles. One of the skeptics was Dr. Vannevar Bush, the outstanding head of our wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development, which coordinated the work of some 30,000 scientists, engineers and technicians. As late as 1949 he raised serious questions whether the guided missile could be “made to hit anything at the end of its flight”; he also felt its cost would be “astronomical.” He added that as a means of carrying high explosives, “it is a fantastic proposal.” He felt that in view of the cost of atomic bombs, we would not “trust them to a highly complex and possibly erratic carrier of inherent low precision.”
2

While there were some eminent men of science who differed from this view, it nevertheless was widely held. In the postwar years, before we had developed the thermonuclear bomb and the small but relatively powerful nuclear weapons, we failed to give the attention to the guided missile which, in the light of hindsight, we should have given it.

Another reason for this failure, and here intelligence enters into it, was the fact that in the first decade after the end of the war, we had inadequate information with regard to the Soviet missile program.

Drawing boards are silent, and short-range missiles make little commotion. As the techniques of science were put to work and the U-2 photographs became available after 1956, “hard” intelligence began to flow into the hands of the impatient estimators. Their impatience was understandable, for great pressure had been put on them by those in the Department of Defense concerned with our own missile programs and missile defenses. Planning in such a field takes years, and the Defense Department felt that this was a case in which it was justified in asking the intelligence community to project several years in advance the probable attainments of the Soviet program.

As in the earlier case of Soviet bomber production, the intelligence community, I am safe in saying, would be quite content if it were not called upon for such crystal-ball gazing. But since military planning requires estimates of this nature, the planners say to the intelligence officers: “If you won’t give us some estimate as to the future, we will have to prepare it ourselves. You intelligence officers should really be in a better position to make the predictions than we are.” For the intelligence service to deny this would be tantamount to saying it was not up to its job.

Thus early figures of Soviet missile production had to be developed on the basis of estimated production and development capabilities over a period in the future. Once again it was necessary to determine how the Soviet Union would allocate its total military effort. How much of it would go into missiles? How much into developing the nuclear potential? How much into the heavy bomber, as well as the fighter planes and ground-to-air defense to meet hostile bombers? How much into submarines? And, in general, how much into elements of attack and how much into those of defense?

It was due to this measure of incertitude during the late 1950s that the national debate over the so-called missile gap developed. Then, based on certain proven capabilities of the Soviets and on our view of their intentions and overall strategy, estimates were made as to the number of missiles and nuclear warheads which could be available and on launchers several years in the future.

There is no doubt that tests of Soviet missiles in 1957 and afterward showed a high competence in the ICBM field. Soviet shots of seven to eight thousand miles into the far Pacific were well advertised, as, of course, was the orbiting of the first
Sputnik
. Their testing in the intermediate fields must also have been gratifying to them. But would they use their bulky and somewhat awkward “first generation” ICBM, effective though it was, as the missile to deploy, or would they wait for a second or third generation? Were they in such a hurry to capitalize on a moment of possible missile superiority that they would sacrifice this to a more orderly program? The answer, in retrospect, seems to be that they chose the orderly program. As soon as this evidence appeared, the ICBM estimates, as in the case of the bombers, were revised downward.