Panelnlelligencc and Ihe Arms Race
Georgeand gentlemen. If you might begin
taking your seats. If you could move in and take your seats, that would be helpful. I'd appreciate it. ould have your attention. We are offine start,hink this conference is unprecedented and there is another unprecedented aspect of this, this is the first time, in the experience of this building, that we'veine for the men's room and not the ladies' room. So there mayew people coming in late.
As in other lines of work, academics have some fancy titles. I'm fortunate to have some fancy titles, and we get to do the high-powered tasks. m about to do one. Thereoor brown Plymouth, Texas licenseZCX, whose lights are on. So you may want to turn them off if that's your car. Well any rate, we are offreat start, and to continue our examination of OS intelligence at the end of the Cold War, our second panel will focus on the arras race. Chairing this panelan who has extensive experience in the field, including serving as Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff9
hat critical period. I'm especially pleased to announce that since September, he's become Chancellor of theniversity system. Please welcome our panel chair, Howard Graves.
HG: Thank you George. Anday forouple of
minutes give you welcome from theniversity system, and to express our gratitude for all of your words of sympathy for the tragedy which we suffered at our flagship here yesterday. The flagship university is the campus where we are currently located, of course, and we have0 students here. In all we are We have another nine campuses spread throughout the state. From up in the panhandle at Amarillo down to Corpus Christi, and from Laredo in the West to Texarkana in the East. So0 students are all part ofystem. What is unique about us is we also have eight state agencies which reachillion Texans annually through our extension services and our experiment stations. So that in Houston, we have groups working on family advocacy and gang membership responsible community management. Weorkforce training group. The engineering extension service. And then we have all of
our agriculture and engineering experiment stations throughout the state as well. So we are very proud to participate in the conference this morning and we welcome all of you to Bryan/College Station and to.
Now the first panel this morning discussed the broad role of intelligence in predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union, our panel is going toritical subset of those issues, that relating to the Arms race. We'veistinguished panel with us. Arnie Kanter is the principal of the Scowcroft Group and Senior Associate of the Form for International Policy; Steve Hadleyrincipal of the Scowcroft Groupartner in the Washington firm of Shea and Gardner; Ron Lehman is the Director for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore Labs; Jim Woolsey is with the Washington firm of Shea and Gardner, and, as you know, he was the DCI3 What's really thrilling about this group is that sitting in front of you, with the exception of Reggie Bartholomew, is the wonderful group of which91 was known as the "un-group." We were the planners and the policy developers which fed the principals and the deputies for policy dealing with the collapse of the Soviet
Union. Dealing with arms control, and that thrilling time allowed us to develop friendships that can't really be matched. Doug MacEachin was the CIA rep to ournd we've invited him to join the table as well.
So we've asked our panelists this morning to consider three questions. What was the nature of the US intelligence regarding Soviet arms capabilities and intentions? How effectively was this intelligence employed by US arms negotiators? And in hindsight, how accurate did the intelligence prove to be? Arnie is coming to this from being the National Security Council Staff Director for Arms Control and Policy, and then the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs during our time. Steve Hadley was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy. Ron was the Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and Jim was the ambassador in charge of the CFE reductions, and Doug was the CIA rep to the "un-group". So, Arnie, would you lead off please.
AK: As Howard said, the topic of the panel may be
intelligence of the arms race, but what you have here
is most of theinger, oreg Bartholomew substitute. And so I, at least, would like to address the issue more narrowly than the arms race, and focus on the role of intelligence in arms control, the arms control negotiations in the Bush Administration. Let me just say that this here group, as Howard said, was an informal, interagency group, that was charged to take up some of the more controversial, or sensitive, issues, which came up in the START talks and other arms control negotiations. And, given the subject of the conference, we did press Doug MacEachin into service on this panel, even though he has already just paid his dues. ust say that, in mymuess, based on my recollections as chairman of then my remarks about the Intelligence Community,onestly don't know how much ofave to say really is about the Intelligence Community and its contribution, and how much is really about Doug MacEachin. When we are done we'll find out from Doug whether he is pleased, or displeased, about my inability to make that distinction. But let me just say at the outset that on the one hand, as good as Doug is, and as superb as Doug was,now he wasn't doing it all alone. But on the otherincerely believe that when the
definitive history of the role of intelligence in arms control is written, Doug will emerge as one of the unsung heroes of that tale. ean that quite sincerely. I'll let Jim speak for himself, but from the perspective of thehink of Jim as, shall we say, the beneficiary, he might say the unfortunate beneficiary of some of what came out of thenow Jim. if someone asks him. will be all to happy to tell him how grateful he was for all the help he got from us,uspect you might not even have to ask him before he tells you. But enough about the *un-group.*
Let me talk about the contribution of intelligence. I'd like to divide my remarks into four areas. The first area in which intelligenceontribution was intelligence on present .and future Soviet military plans and doctrine. ould also include Soviet intentions in this category. And this intelligence provided the essential context within which our arms control strategy and negotiations, were supposed to take place. And indeed, in dealing with the Soviet threat, that is, or at least ought to have been, what arms control was supposed to have been all about. And this is no mystery. ay supposed to because, at
least the wuii-group/ so Taran recall, we didn'tot of time talking about the intelligence judgments on Soviet doctrine and intentions and plans. We instead received and digested that intelligence, as individuals, from our individual agencies and positions. And we kind of carried around in our heads, as we tackled the specific arms control issues we were focusing on. And since, given how we were distributed across the government, we almost surely relied on difference parts of the Intelligence Community, or at least accessed overlapping, but not identical, intelligence products. None of us relied solely upon the intelligence Community. And frankly, we each probablyifferent discount rate we applied to the intelligence we got on, what is inevitably, kind of fuzzy, judgmental, intuitive assessments about things like Soviet intentions. Andhink there's atair chance, as we all got together to work on specific issues, we were carrying around in our heads slightly different assumptions, or presumptions, or premises, that often went unarticulated as we did our work. And we see whether we pursue that further inession.
How good was this kind of intelligence? ould say that from our perspective it was as good as could reasonably be expected. But that doesn't stop me from wishing that it had been better- And byish that it had been more definitive, and expressed with more confidence. Now had that been possible,ustrankly doubt that it would have been possible. But had it beenhink it would have helped us to negotiate arms control agreements, both more efficiently, and would have resulted in arms control agreements with were less complicated and less cumbersome than was, in retrospect, required to achieve the objectives we sought.
The second category on intelligence was on soviet negotiating tactics and objectives. Namely, what was the other guy up to. on'ton't recall after lunch,on't recall, again the nun-group"ot of time on Soviet tactics. ould be interested to see what my colleagues here remember about that, and both Jim and Ron, as negotiators,hink will have some real insights into the role of intelligence on negotiations.
the third category is intelligence on soviet weapons systems- and given the discussion of the first panel, it probably is worthwhile to remind us all that while the soviet union may, by thes, have beenhird world economy that was in decline, from the perspective of our jobs, it wasilitary superpower, anduclear superpower. and those, it is very easy to keep those two ideas in mind simultaneously. our problem was the soviet military superpower, notwithstanding what was going on in the soviet union-
on strategic nuclearould rate the intelligence as outstanding. at the same time, and without in any way wanting to take away from what were very impressive intelligence acconiplishments, if this wasn't the easy stuff for the intelligence community to do, it was surely the meat and potatoes of the intelligence community's job in that period. and for whateveron't think we evererious question about soviet, the capabilities of soviet strategic nuclear weapons, for which the intelligence community didn'tretty good, pretty confident answer. and,uspect that performance in this area was so good that there were times at we began
to simply take it for granted, That we woulduestion and we would get an answer, and of course we got an answer, that's what the Intelligence Community does. We kind of got spoiled. hink the intelligence about Soviet chemical weapons was not, and frankly could not, have been as complete and definitive. ould still rank it as good enough. Ron,hink was much closer to these issues, mayifferent view, or in anyore complete view. On conventional weapons, I'll let Jim speak to this,hink the intelligence, what the Intelligence Community was asked to do in CFE negotiations, was different,hink harder.
The fourth category is the intelligence which told us both what we had to monitor in the arms control agreements we hoped to conclude, in order to be able to assess Soviet compliance, and sort Of the other side of the coin, what provisions we had to get included in those agreements so that compliance could be monitored. Now for those of you who do not bear all the scars those of us up here do on the distinction between arms control monitoring and arms controlant to acknowledge to all my colleagues up heretill do remember that there was that distinction. But
I'm not going to say any more about it. Instead,ust want to talk about what, in this jargon, is the monitoring side of the equation, which is, byean what we asked the Intelligence Community to do.
And let me ask you to cast your mind and memory back to the Cold War, you remember the Cold War. Our public posture at the time was wTrust, but verify." on't think that it's any secret that the real mantra at the time was, "Don't trust them one bit, and insist on the highest possible verification." We also need to remember that at that time both arms control, the whole idea of arms control negotiations with the Soviets in general, and the verification we were requiring in those agreements, in particular, were highly charged issues in terms of American domestic politics. Indeed politics which often had ideological overtones, andhought ranged into theology. And finally, we need to remember thisime when these were the Soviets. There were the Soviets for whom intrusive inspections were still pretty much an anathema. So, what we most wanted, and needed, on this score is what they most hated and resisted. And that's the minefield that we, in the policy community, sent the Intelligence Community in to roam around.
ave to sayhink that on the whole the Intelligence Community did very well in navigating this mine field. hink they were very good at meeting two challenges. On the one hand they were very good at distinguishing between what they had to see and know, in order to make confident monitoring judgments, and what fell more intoill call the "nice to have" category. hink this ability to make these judgments prove critical in the chemical weapons convention, when the challenge of monitoring other parties' compliance by means of so-called challenge inspections, had to be balanced against the need to limit, and, indeed, sometimes preclude foreign access to sensitive American facilities. That balancing act we had to face very, very squarely in the chemical weapons convention.
On the other hand the Intelligencehought, was very creative in helping to devise the provisions and procedures which gave them what they needed, but still were negotiable with the Soviets, Very creative in threading that needle. While the Intelligence Community was very good,aid, on monitoring issues, the Intelligence Community could not perform miracles, hole bunch of miracles it
couldn't perform, but let me focus on one. one of the miracles the Intelligence Community failed to perform is that it couldn't save us from ourselves- For example, the Intelligence Community could never conclusively rule out the possibility that the Soviets could somehow reload silos after an initial nuclear strike, or could covertly deploy and then employ what we called non-deployed missiles. Likewise, it could not, and did not promise perfection in monitoring. That is, that every instance of cheating would be caught. So that left it to us, the policymaker, to decide what was good enough, and spawned memorable phrases, such as, "adequatelynd "effectivelyhich fortunatelyas in theidn't have to testify about. And we policymakers, who on these matters were not always profiles in courage, sometimes tried to pass the buck back to the Intelligence Community by pressing them to say, "What would it take to squeeze out that next increment in monitoring confidence?" And given the political climate,mphasize the political climate, the frequent result,nderscore, had much to do with the Intelligence Community's customers, us, rather than with the Intelligence Community itself. The frequent results were onerous, expensive, kind of
Rube Goldberg provisions and procedures whose contribution, at least in retrospect, to enhancing our national security is at least questionable.
I just got the red flag. hink that, we in the policy community need to ask ourselves what we really need from the intelligence Community by way of monitoring confidence, if, and as, there are future arms control agreements- If we insist that the agreement of hand achieved the highest possible monitoring confidence, the Intelligence Community will duly tell us what treaty provisions will be required to do so. But except in very unusual circumstances, and with very unusual intelligence officials, they will not tell us whether it's worth the trouble, because that's our responsibility, not theirs, in my view, at the end of the day, the test which the Intelligence Community as asked to pass, what is the job of the Intelligence Community. It's job is to inform the judgments of policymakers. So that the policymakers in turn can make better and wiser decisions about matters which bear on our national security, in this context, in the time in which we are speaking, how did the intelligence community perform on this test? Well it needs to be said that they had lousy students. They had students
who didn't; read their assignments, didn't do the assigned reading, and didn't listen carefully to the lectures. and given how lousy the students were, us,ish they would speak more clearly and succinctly, and that they wrotetylealled, "dare to be wrong." which is to say, write that way rather than in ways that are so carefully hedged that, on the one hand, they are never wrong, no matter what happens, but they obscure the key points the policymakers need to get. eeling that the intelligence judgments were much richer than we appreciated and made use of. my bottom line is that evenotoriously hard graderas teaching,ould have to give the intelligencerade somewhere in the range of *a" on these matters. thank you.
we are going to have two opportunities to hear from the user group, which is what we represent. we represent the staff that would feed the deputies committee and the principals committee the information for their meeting, and we'll ask steve hadley now to present the representation from the pentagon, from defense.
SH: ould say that on thatepresented the office of the Secretary of Defense, worked for Secretary Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, and Howard Graves during this period, and Barry McCaffery and John Shalikashvili, after him represented the chairman. One of the directions we got from our bosses was, if there are disagreements, we want to hear them. We, Secretary Cheney and General Powell, and we want to get them resolved because we want to have the building as much as possible speaking with one voice in this interagency process. So Howardere very much joined at the hip in this process.
On the nature of capabilities, the nature of the intelligence on capabilities andouple of points. On Arnie's point about what was happening in the Soviet Union and then Russia on military doctrine and operational capabilities, and what that told us about Soviet versus Russian intentions, thisard assignment in this period because so much was changing, and indeed collapsing within the Soviet Union. Secretary Cheneyeekly briefing in which the DoD intelligence constituents came in and briefed the Secretaryariety of others of us, on exactly what was happening in the Soviet Union, and then
Russia, in real time, and what it was doing to their military capabilities and capacities- And that was, at some points it was evenaily briefing- And that was very helpful, because it provided the background when you would go to the interagency sessions to talk about what should we be doing in the arms control and negotiating standpoint. So in terms of DoD, that's how we tried to accommodate it.
in terms of intelligence onhink Arnie has it about right- Quite frankly, where there were things to be seen from satellites, we could do very well missile silos and tank divisions- Where you depended on other kinds of intelligence, such as the chemical weapons area, what were Soviet inventories and capabilities, that was less good. And in things like the biological weapons, where the Soviets were pursuing activities which had been talked about publicly, that some people believe were in breach of the biological weapons convention, it was hard indeed- And if you didn'tefector, it was near impossible. In terms of intentions, I'veittle about Soviet military intentions, and how we tried toandle on that during this period. In terms of negotiating intentions, what were the Russians, or the Soviet or
the russian negotiators, going to propose when you met them nexthink the intelligence was actually pretty bad, and i'd like doug to comment on this. doug would routinely advise us, and have us read documents that told us what we knew about what soviet, and then russian, negotiators might be proposing at upcoming meetings, and what splits might be going on within the soviet, or russian, dialogue. and, quiteever really saw those reports confirmed, andaw when we got in the meeting and started to have conversations and negotiation, and that may beasn't aseader as doug, but that was an area where quiteidn't find in the user group wehole lot.
let meittle bit about process, and how the intelligence input worked in this "un-group" organization that arnie described. we certainly had the nie's to provide baseline military capabilities, and one of the firstound pleasantead the bound set of documents that were released for this conference,emember them. that is to say, we did read them. we did use them. they didaseline for our considerations. but we needed really for the activities of theore tailored
Intelligence support to get specific data or to answer specific questions that we needed answers to, to develop US negotiating positions. And that was really provided by the Arms Control Intelligence Staff, or the ACIS staff, which,nderstood it,omnunity staff that Doug chaired, and had representativesariety of intelligence agencies, namely DIA, CIA, and others. Doug, as chairman of the ACIS, participated in the meetings of the "un-group"ery constructive way. He would try and synthesize the evidence, the intelligence evidence orally during our meetings. He would try faithfully to outline splits in the coranunity, which usually involved DIA, Howard and my home agency; and CIA; and INR. And he would give his best judgment on the intelligence based on the data. He wasocal point for going out to the Community and getting the data and the analysis that we needed for our operations, and then bringing it back in written and oral form. ould emphasize that while we may not be qualified to do it, and you may not feel we are qualified to do it, in the end,hink all of the policy people on the 'un-group" were making their own intelligence judgments. That is to say, while we were interested in the bottom line judgments of the Intelligence Community, we wanted to know the basis of
those judgments. We wanted to know what the intelligence Community knew- with what confidence, and in some sense more importantly, what they did not know, which was just ashink, as what they did know. hink that one of the things that Doug exemplified, was, he was humble about the intelligence and was willing to say what we knew, with what confidence, and what we didn't know. And that was very useful to us.
Secondly, that institutional structure was oral. It was interactive, andhink, was very important because it allowed you to test the data and test the conclusions drawn from the data. It iseplacement for the written, butecessary supplement to the written intelligence product if the Community is going to be able, the Intelligence Community is going to be able to serve the policy community. And just to emphasize that, that was certainly true in the "un-group* level, but it was also true at the next level up. Secretary Cheney, during the time when things were changing so rapidly in the Soviet Union and Russia, every monthaturday morning session that used to run for about four hours, where he would have some representatives of the
Intelligence Community, but also outside experts to talk about what was going on in the Soviet Union, then Russia, and what it meant. And thatay for him to test the data and form his own conclusions, which were used obviously by him in his own participation in this process.
This interactive process in some sense reached its height in dealing with certain long, contentious US intelligence issues that had been aroundong time, and that needed to be resolved in the context of some of the specific negotiations that we were pursuing. ot of these involved strategic nuclear issues. They'll be familiar to some of you. The range of the Backfire Bomber. Whether the Russians had tunnels in which they could hide their strategic nuclear submarines. What was the extent of their rapid reload capability? Thereariety of these. They had beenong time, and had inhibited progress on the negotiations. And one of the things that Doug did on several occasions was to bring in the competing points of view within the Intelligence Community, usually CIA on one side and our DIA people on the other, and have them outline their views to the "un-group." It helped substantively, because it
allowed us to reach some conclusions based on that intelligence evidence to fashion negotiations and negotiating positions. Conclusions on these kinds of questions. How serious was the issueational security perspective? What were the risks involved in the issue if it wasn't addressed? What proposals could we make to the Soviets, or to the Russians, on how the issue might be addressedreaty? And what priority should that issue have with respect to all the other issues that were on the table in our negotiations with the Soviets, and then the Russians? So substantively it was very helpful in putting these issues asideolicy standpoint.
It also, quite frankly, helped Howardureaucratically. Because the DIA, Intelligence Community had an opportunity to present their views, andearing, and at the end of the day recognized that the policy community would make the judgment about what the consequences of that intelligence would be for the positions taken in the negotiations. There are obviously risks in this intimate involvement, in the way that Doug MacEachin had in the policy process. You have to be careful, and Doug always was, not to offer policy judgments, or let your own policy preference
begin to affect the spin that you give to the intelligence. hink also, for Doug to do what he did, he had to be able to say to his various constituent communities in the CIA and elsewhere that itair and open process in which all could participate and play. And that isay of avoiding the Intelligence Community fromolicy agency, but also getting into political trouble. And the distinction that Arnie mentioned between an intelligence judgment as to monitoring capability, how likely we would be able toussian or Soviet violation, and whether thaterification issue, namely whether cheating in that respect would threaten national security. That was an effort toine between an intelligence judgment, namely monitoring, but avoid getting the Intelligence Community into the more political issue, as Arnie described, about verification, which they should not be either substantively or politically. And that was an issue for the policy community. So, bottomhink that one of the reasons that Arnie gives the grade he does to the performance of the Intelligence Community is because of the rather unique process that developed in the context of support to the nun-group" in the arms control area,hink, quite frankly, that Doug
MacEachinot or credit ror that. Thank you.
HG; And Ron Lehman, from the point of view of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Ron,
RL. The most pleasant thing about this conference is the opportunity to get together again with so many good, close friends, not only at this table but in the audience. It reminds us, though, that its not just friendship that permits us to deal with these issues, but it's also how you organize. And Arnie has givenitook at the nun-group." The nun-group"redecessor which,as on the NSCelped invent along with one of the other unsung heroes of this process, the late Bob Linhart. We were having problems because in the early Reagan administration, the decision had been made that we would have Cabinet government. Nearly every President says he's going to have Cabinet government. The problem is that so many of these issues are interagency issues, with overlapping interests, that it is difficult sometimes to pullrocess where
you canair adjudication and an optimization of the decisionmaking. And we were given the task of puttingroup. ish we had called it theut when Bob gave me the first draft, it was called the Senior Arms Control Policy Group. ooked at itaid, "They are going to call this the SAC PIG, You'd better change it." Bob said he would change it, but somehow when we sent it across to the West Wing the word processor didn't make all the changes, and it took two national security advisors later to get that "PIG" out of there- But the SAC PIG had another problem other than its name, and that was, the concept under then Judge Clark was to bring everybody before the Judge so they could get their arguments out there. But once you said that's the vehicle for getting the argumentation out, you created an incentive for everybody to come. esult, weery large number of very senior people who didn'tot of knowledge about the issues, but insisted that they had to be at the meeting. Iteal difficulty-
So what we ended up doing was creating another group,lso wish we had called theut we didn't. Bob Linhart referred to them as his Mafias.
And we'd have this group ot junior experts, who actually understood the issues, had not yet reached their levels of incompetence, and they had at least enough professional background to understand what was at stake for their own departments and agencies, we would kind of pre-digest things in these Mafia meetings, but the problem was, they really could not speak for their bosses completely. ommend the Mun-group" for doing is taking two somewhat defective mechanisms attempting to solve the same problem, and turning itighly effective mechanism. The Intelligence Community's role in this, in may ways, was to provide the currency, the data, that we would sometimes talk about. hinkould emphasize the same points that Arnie and Steve have madeean, sometimes the intelligence issue wasn't the key issue. ant to come back to that. But one pointant to make it that, every now and then, because it always had its special interest, but because the intelligence Communityse that word advisedly, had no policy interests, thereense in which itanity check. Itomethingeutral broker who could keep us honest and pull us back into reality if, in our resolution of our various disputes, we got too far out.
The real history of the role of intelligence in arms control, as you say here, the arms race, has not been told. It won't be told here today. It ought to be told in great detail, and in great clarity. hink it actuallyascinating story. I'd like to just highlight,ry to address the questions we were given, and I'll take them in somewhat disjointed order, or at least I'll answer them in order, but pieces will move around. ould like to highlight is that the intelligence Community very clearly helped us understand, not just treaty-limited equipment, or negotiating strategies, but the broader context in which we were negotiating these issues. And that that was in some ways the most important contribution- Now it is true that Jimften had to focus on fairly detailed questions, and when we were dealing with compliance questions, they were often less judgments about the military balance than they were judgmentsidget. Buthink the bigger issue was the broader context. And I'd like to come back to that.
what was the nature of US intelligence regarding Soviet arms capabilities and intentions? That was the
question we were given. I'd like to use an example of INF (intermediate Range Nuclear Forces)umber of reasons. One is, that's onehink my colleagues are not going to talk about, reminds us that the process began earlier,hink Doug has been highlighting, and that it had to continue through. And the pointant to make about INF is this. When theirst was deployed, thereot of to-ing and fro-ing in the intelligence Community about how many there were going to be, what its capabilities were, and how it fit into Soviet military doctrine. But ultimately, foron't detail, that never became the most important question. The most important question was in essence, what did it mean about Soviet intentions, and how, in particular, would our Allies react to that? It very quickly became the issue of decoupling. The issue of decoupling was very distant from the question of target coverage and issues like that. Itighly political question.
Now there were some early issues in INF that the Intelligence Community got involved in. Some of them seem, in retrospect, to have been silly. For example, you would have been amazed how many high-level public opinion leaders, and political leaders, in Europe and
the United states, kept saying, "We're not sure this exists. You can't showicture of thisnd the knowing people thought that the reason was sources and methods. The real reasonemember it was, we nevericture. Not of the missile itself, because it was always canisterized. There was another issue that developed very early on, and that was, Soviet intentions in the negotiations. How flexible could they be? As you know, since there were divisions politically and domestically within the NATO countries, including within the United States, over the so-called dual trackot of people were interested in whether or not we couldegotiated settlement early, that would meet whatever it was the Soviets need, and either preclude our need to deployment, to deploy, which many of the Allies wanted, or, would permit us to do some limited deployment that we might find acceptable. One of the people that Charles Gati mentioned, who talked about bumps in the road,ook at the time that suggested that because of the Soviet walk-out, that, in fact, we hadignificant opportunity to get an INF agreement. But our assessment at the time was, there wasn't much chance to get an acceptable negotiated INF agreement.
RL: (Continuing) . . .'d be interested if in hearing
any more from people who were there at the time, as to whether there were widely diverse views within the Intelligence Community, but among us the expectation was that it would not happen. aw in this book that said we missed an opportunity, thereuotationad with Bessmyrtrykk, in Moscow, hich suggested that the Soviets might be prepared toew cruise missiles in Great Britain. ever saw the reporting cable, but this did appear in this book as an evidence that we had missed the chance for an agreement. But as Bessmyrtrykk confirmed withew months ago, in public, in fact their assessment was that we would deploy. They would have no choice but to challenge us geopolitically to see how much pressure the alliance could take. But at the end, after we had deployed, who knew then perhaps if you use Cruise missiles in Great Britain, the context was exactly the opposite. How you interpreted the Soviet attitude and intentionegotiation was vital to the outcome of the negotiation. aised this about INF, because in somehink we underestimate the role of INF in bringing about the end
of the Cold War. Because early on, It was obviously designed, the whole process waa designed, to put pressure on the West. But in fact,ubber band in may way, it snapped back and it became one of the vehicles that Gorbachev could use for trying to revisit the question of the burden of the defense budget. In INF there were some of those specific intelligence questions though, that you all are interested in. Many people are not aware that six months after we had signed the INF treaty, we were back in Geneva renegotiating provisions that had to do with what came out of theroduction facility at Votkinsk. It turned out that what we had always thought came out of Votkinsk actually had never come out of Votkinsk, it was always something less than the full-up And it got caught up in the questionystem, which our negotiator then, Mike Glitman, referred to as Fat-Boy, which was some other system they were developing that they didn't want us to inspect. And we had to negotiate provisions in the blind.
We weren't the only ones in the blind. At the coffee pot, one of our people overheard themiscussion on their side in which they revealed to each other that their technical experts didn't know how long
Fat-Boy was themselves. So Viktor Karpov, their negotiator,ery strong position that they simply had to agree to the database that was in the protocol, or addendum, to the treaty, and they could agree to no other numbers. It didn't matter what reason or rationale you brought to the problem, ant to commend the Intelligence Community because it was Jay Castillo who leaned over and whispered and said, "The database doesn't have the inner stage." So what did we do? We said, "OK, we'll agree to the database if you'll agree that we add up the numbers." We accepted their position, insisted that they add up the numbers, but the problem was they didn't know now if they could accept their position because they didn't know if that number was big enough. Did we effectively use the intelligence Community on little things? Yes. Did we use it effectively on big things? Yes, Did we sometimes get it wrong? Yes, sometimes we did.
Sometimes we helped the intelligence Community, Early on in the INF negotiations we were trying to discover what would you definearhead. And there was this incredible conversation in which one of the Soviet technical people was talking as if thearheads didn't have an air shield over them- And we thought it
ranslation problem, or itoncept problem. It sounded like he was saying that the things just lay against each other. Well,aid, we neverhotograph of one- ever saw one myselfaw it in the Smithsonian. But guess what? When we finalized the INF treaty, it discovered they don't do all things the same way we do them. Some things they do differently. The negotiators were leading the Intelligence Community in this regard in terms of gathering information. hink throughout this history you'll discover that thereery effective mutual supporting relationship. Sometimes we helped them just as much as they helped us gather information.
In hindsight, how accurate did the intelligence prove to be? I'd like to pick up the Moynihan issue. on't want to push the question of the economy too much. ean, my impression is that itittle bit over time, but that by and large, whether it was the Intelligence Community or the broader Sovietologyhink in general we tended to, in GNP terras, underestimate the percentage of GNP, by some definition, that went into the military. But we probably overestimated the size of the economy. So we
were, in essence, the concernarger piecemaller pie.
ant to address another aspect of this, which is, how do you do the conversion? And you go look at Soviet equipment, and often, functionally, it was really outstanding. The human engineering might be rough. You know itot of crude welds that cut your hands, but on the other hand, it would have incredible expensive ball bearingsiece of equipment we didn't even think was important. These were issues to be addressed. But at the end of the Cold War, Moynihan calls us up, the negotiators, and we're testifying on START, and Moynihan says, uYou were let down by the Intelligence Community. If they had told you that the Soviet Union was going to collapse tomorrow, that would have changed everything." rgued, e weren't let down. ean you've already heard some of the discussion, but in fact we had had discussions with Moynihan, in Geneva, on the question of the future of the Soviet Union. as Steve's predecessor in the US-Turkish High Level Defense Group, our OSD people had been talking to the Turks about Central Asia and the problems that were developing
there, and in the caucasus. it wasn't as if we were totally blind to this.
but let's suppose thererystal ball, and that crystal ball could predict the future. ave negotiated start differently? aw akhromeyev at theigning ceremony. heat in the back. he was very, very depressed- sad. he said we'd had many good conversations that were very positive at times. he was very negative on the future of the soviet union. but what if he had leaned over to me and said, "you know ron, in three weeks, we are going tooup." ave jumped up, run up in front of the cameras and said, "stop theigning treaty- ust learned that the soviet union's going toig hiccup in three weeks?" no, because, to some degree, we had already had these backlashes with the hawks, and we were trying to design the treaty to deal with that kind of thing.
in cfe, let me give you an example and i'll then turn it over to jim. at one point, very late in the negotiations, general moiseyev comes in to an *un-group" meeting. hinkhink we were maybe all there. he pounds on the table, he looks down the
side of Che soviet delegation and says, "What tool believes that Kiev is on the flank?" And began to reopen the numbers and definitions of theean of the zones. Now suppose that the CIA hadrystal ball department that could actually perfectly predict the future, and they predicted that Jim was going to be their boss shortly, so they had gone to him and said, "Jim, guess what. To help you in this negotiation, not only is Kiev going to be on the flank, it's not even going to be in the Soviet Union." So use that on Moiseyev. OK. But now, let's suppose the KGB had the same crystal ball capability. Could you imagine Moiseyev saying, "All right, Woolsey, but let me tell you this. ot only want to reopen the numbers now, butew years, I'm going to have to reopen them again because I've got to worry about former republics of the Soviet Union that I'm going to think are threats to me. And by the way, after that, I'm going to have to reopen the numbers again,ay have to use heavy equipment against my own people."
My point is, intelligence in the policy process weren't trying to predict the future, we were trying so shape it. And if we had been in the future, andime
machine, we would have come back and tried to do many of the same things we tried to do together, because we would have wanted to change the future. Jim, over to you.
HG: I've asked Jim to share with us not only his insights
from his time with CFE, but also some insights he might have had in reflecting back as DCI. Jim, please.
JW: Thanks Howard. In looking out over this audience, itreat honor to be here. This may be the greatest collection of intelligence about intelligence in modern history. ould, perhaps however,ormulation from former President Kennedy, except on those occasions. Jones dined alone. irst was introduced to the need for intelligence on CFE when three days after taking over the negotiations, the evening of Novemberas sitting in my apartment in Vienna watching the Berlin Wall go down. And demonstrating the same keen analytical abilityew years laterried to recruit the then Chief of Staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, George Tenet, to be General
Council of the Smithsonian, and he told me after letting me payery expensive lunch, that he had never in fact been to law school, bserved the Berlin wall going down, and then wrote my wife back inetter, which, unfortunately, she still has. It went something like this; Something interesting happening in Berlin on CNN this evening* Well, moving along to Christmas vacation. Looking forward to you and the boys coming over. hink we'll go skiing,ould like for us all to go to Prague because, although you'veevernd they haven't,ould like for them to seeeal Stalinist state looks like - .hen we wereew weeks later, on the eve of Christmas, of course, the crowds on the bridges were singing American civil rights songs in Czech and holding aloft banners saying, Havel naavel to the Castle. on't stand on any rock of precedence in my own right with respect to the use of intelligence, or analytical capability, about what was going to happen in Europe in9
I will say this about the intelligence that we had over the years. Andm harkening back more to the three yearspent as Undersecretary of the Navy
in thes, and the years as an advisor, or delegate-at-large on the arms control negotiations during the Reaganart-time position in Europe, Which was that, on technical intelligence in matters related to individual weapons systems, Soviet war plans, matters of great national importance of that sort, intelligence generally was not just good, it was superb. Certainly there were phenomena such as the bow wave and the window of vulnerability and such that Doug described in which, on macro issues, including from time to time GNP numbers and so forth, things were off base. But on the things that really affected our planning for naval forces and the like, for example, the product of the Intelligence Community was first-rate. There were things like, the so-called greater than expected threats, so clearly labeled which forecast in thes large numbers of ballistic missile defense systems in the Soviet Union, and helped to produce the move to MIRV Americanevelopmenthink we would have undertaken anyway, without those forecasts. And there have been minor flaps here and there since. For example,6 there was some press about some material that came out of the Ames damage assessment, suggesting that the Soviets had been massively crafty in givingeed
material, which had led us to spend vast amounts in thes ands on weapons systems that were unneedod. It's aboutonsense. Most of this, all of this feed material, with one exception, was over obsolete and irrelevant systems, and had no real particular effect on decisionmaking in the Pentagon.
The American Intelligence Community, and the CIA, inhink, on this overall issue of material that was relevant in the arms control negotiations, and on the overall direction of the Soviet Union,ar better job than most any other institutions in American life, and certainly better than almost all American academics,ew very notable exceptions. There were some people who were remarkably prescient, Charlie Wolf, Harry Rowan, Zbig (zbigniewharles Gati on some issues. The two most prominent individuals, who, at least in general terms, were the mont prescient, were Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Ronald Reagan, because of some of the things they said in thes ands that looked remarkably accurate now. uesshink about that is that sometimes the Irish just hear voices that the rest of us don't hear.
Now with respect to the CFE negotiations themselves, although most of the intelligence was quite good, there were occasionally whoopsies. And in November, one month before Gorbachev's remarkablepeech, an assessment came out that said, "The Warsaw Pact states will not accept the current NATO proposal which in effect calls on the Pact to take gigantic cuts in tanks and artillery for minor cuts on the NATO side." Well- of course, that's what Gorbachev did,onth later, when he proposed the unilateral Soviet reductions. And those, but he surprised everyone with that speech, not just the CIA. And the reductions were rather well underway inhen the terms of reference for CFE had been negotiated. And the negotiations had begun. In the CFE negotiations, weeally rather different problem with respect to intelligence and conduct of the negotiationshole, than almost any other type of negotiation, we wereace with the clock. Somewhat, where you have to start outprint and keep going much longer than you reallyprint should last. Because we were lookingime table in which, by the Fallere year later, people were already starting to talk about a
CSCE summit. In Paris, in which Che terms Cor the future of Europe would be set out. And it was, the United States government felt, extremely important to lock in the reductions which Gorbachev had announced, and which NATO on the whole was willing to recognize, and the overall pattern leading to equal levels for the two blocs, at that time in Europe, as distinct from equal reductions, which had been the bane of overyone's existence on the Western side for the many, many years of the MBFR talks. So our problem wasuge job done inear's time.
Several things made this possible. Pirst of all, thereood deal of discipline and commitment in the Bush administration. One of the most important things was that President Bush and Brent Scowcroft and Secretary Baker refused until the very last minute, thank God, to commit to even attending the CSCE summit in Paris, unless thereFE Treaty. And it gradually became clear by the Summer0 that they were serious, and, therefore, many of our adversaries and, most difficulty, one or two of our Allies finally agreed that we wouldreaty and not some sort of statement of principles. It was made much easier, of course, by the fact that beginning with my surprise in
prague, the warsaw pact nations' governments were collapsing inndate of abouteek until byxcept for east germany, the soviet union essentiallyo allies. this produced some delicious situations for an american negotiator. ecall once that the chief of the foreign relations committee of the sejm, in warsaw, onyszkiewicz, solidarity activist, later defense minister, came to call on hisld-line, hard-line, polish intelligence officer, and the polish ambassador invited thee to coffee in order to show that he could at least get along with the americans. onyszkiewiczrinned at each other over the coffee in the hofburg,aid to him, "you know i'veolidarity bumper sticker on my truck for ten years." and we looked together at the old-line, hard-line, polish intelligence officer ambassador, who sort of shrunk slightly beneath the table.
the soviets needed, in vienna,omething very different than was the case in cold war era negotiations. they needed to feel that they were not going to be dominated or embarrassed by this western nato and american dominance. so we went to great lengths in order to try to make sure that was true. i
arge number of bilateral American-soviet functions for which the United States, of course, paid. Jazz evenings, picnics, even sauna evenings for the two parts of the two delegations in the home of one of my CIA officers, who's here today, who was heading up some of the analytical work. Some of our most interesting circumstances had to do with the fact that five anyway of the Warsaw Pact powers, at that point, were under new governments, almost panting to getosture such that they might get into NATO someday. So thateturned from meetings in Washington orould first brief the NATO caucus, the NATO ambassadors onas going to do, and then without rubbing the Soviets nose in it, quietly convene all but the East Germans from the Warsaw Pact, and brief them on what we were going to do. Because in many cases, byhey were willing to take American suggestions far more readily than were some of our Allies.
It rapidly came to be clear that some of our Allies, one in particular, our oldest allyould almost automatically object to anything that the United States put forward in the NATO caucus. it earlyactic of thinking up, along with my very able
hat approach we needed on sorne section of tbe treaty, then going and planting the idea with one or more of our smaller Allies, having then propose the idea in the NATO caucus, object to it myself, then watch white our oldest ally's ambassador would smile, getting ready to write his cable back saying that the Americana arc opposed to this so we should consider it seriously. Hear him say something positive and Lhen grumpily come along myself one or two meetings later.
One of my major requirements was to convince everyone that the United States was extremely serious in getting this treaty done and done quickly. And the nature of this treaty was really that iterification regime, the purpose of which was transparency, on which we hung some limitations. The limitations on the Military forces were important. It was important that they be rational, and that they be approximately equal, but the details mattered far less thanound verification regime. And here the Intelligence Community came superbly into play. One of the most importantid to convince all of Viennaas very serious, was persuade Lyn Hansen, who is here, and who had negotiated the Stockholm confidence-building measures, to come back and to head up the
verification work. Everyone in Vienna who knew anything about the history of these types of negotiations knew that if Lyn Hansen was heading up this, it must be something that the United States meant to work. And the CIAhink we called them the Analytical Support Oroup, or something like that, who were on my delegation, including such people as John Lauder and Jim Simon,ajor role in negotiating, particularly, the verification provisions of the treaty. The overall sprint to the fall0 more or less worked. And one of them deeply grateful for is that the gentlemen at this table, and Reg Bartholomew, did not object to too much to my inserting myself, somewhat unofficially, into their groupind of interloper member. id this by means of keeping to myselfot an instructionidn't like, which they would have either drafted or given to the staff to draft. At which point,ould come into the office very early in the morning, that's around midnight Washington time, and call, often, each of them around midnight on secure telephones which they had at their homes, complaining.hile, in order to get rid of me, they more or less accepted me as an unofficial member of the group that was writing my own instructions. as
delighted to be acceptedolleague. This was somewhat easierad known these gentlemen, except for Doug whoew acquaintance, on the average of about twenty years.
I think that it is important to realize also that the one remaining negotiating adversary after the Warsaw Pact collapsed, by the Summeras not really even the Soviet Union, it was principally the Soviet military, Shevardnadze, and my counterpart, Ambassador Gurinevsky, in the Soviet Foreign Ministry, were trying to work Gorbachev's problem, and the Soviet military were the ones who were really dragging their feet. Eventually, their final caper was to put inet of data in the aftermath of the treaty signing, whichumber of divisions' worth of equipment into the Soviet Navy, and declared that by virtue of that fact, since naval forces were excluded from the treaty, that equipment didn't count, It took another eight to nine months, and Shevardnadze's resignation as Foreign Minister, in part over this issue at the endreat deal of persistence personally by President Bush as well as leaders of many of the Cabinet departments involved,umber of Arnie Kantor-drafted letters sent by President Bush to President
gorbachev, to finally bring them around. so this was an odd treaty, in an odd relationship with the intelligence community. the basic issues that the intelligence community dealt with, they dealt with on the delegation and in placeesult of detailed back and forth conferences between doug in washington, and john lauder and jim simon and the others on the delegation in vienna. it was not the type of use of intelligence that one normally would seeob relating to procurement or evenomewhat slower moving negotiation, and one with large strategic moves such as was the case in inf, and salt, and start. in cpe, we had hundreds and hundreds of small to medium-sized issues, and it would have been absolutely impossible for it to have been brought about successfully without the participation of the intelligence community, ave run out of time to talk about the period of being director of central intelligence, i'll turn to that in questions and answers if anyone's interested.
hg: thank you, jim. doug, you've had your time in the
first panel, do you want toouple of comments though before we open up for questions?
DMc: Juat to thank my colleagues, and only send back the message that if you had done everything exactly the same, but with different people, it would not have worked. on't, you know, the people that made up that groupeckot more to do with the outcomeot of people will ever realize. So, it was the best four years of my life. Thank you.
HG: Well, we'veot to talk about. As you can see
from our level, basically looking for capabilities and developments and intentions was more important in the day to day effort, than looking for judgments and predictions. Thereifference also between military strategy and negotiating strategy for our particular purpose. The fact that we were still dealingilitary superpower, the filter that we were looking through was very important. From our standpoint it was also important for the military that we were trying to balance the need for information about the Soviet Onion with our own desire to protect our own security as well. ouple of points that have beenhink are very important. Our role, and
Che role of intelligence both, was to inform the Judgment of policymakers, who were then going to make the political judgments, and we will hear from them tomorrow. Weanel with Brent Scowcroft, with Dick Cheney, and with Jim Baker, who will be able to share those political judgments. Those political judgments were filters that wc ourselves had, but that we also were coming to the meetings with from the standpoint of our bosses. Steve made the point about the interactive process. This particular administration,hought in all of my experiences, struggled more than any I've ever seen toair and open process. air and open process among professionals who trusted each other to be professional. And so that interactive process that Steve described was very active in the Pentagon. And frequently, the civilian staff in the Pentagon was more conservative about many of these issues than was the military staff. But it also was very interactive among ourselves as we came forth to try and find recommendations for our bosses. What waB also very enjoyable was that we were invited as the planners to join our bosses in the Principals group to wrestle it out as well, and frequently participated in those Principals meeting. They were wrestling with a
Ml
consensus chat they could bring forth, again as friends and as professionals to the president for decisionmaking- and brent scowcroftonderful job being an honest broker in those meetings. shaping the future, understanding what gorbachev was allery thrilling time to be active in this, but also as doug hashrilling time to build relationships. may we entertain your questions now. please come forward to the mikes. yes.
ns: i'm ninaow teach. my question really deals with an observation that doug maceachin had earlierrevious session, about the bow wave problem. and my question to you is, was the bow wave issue also your operating assumption? in other words, were there going to be the possibility of three hundred plus strategic nuclear weapons and delivery systems in production, was that, in your mind, indicative of intentions, and, if it was, how did it effect your negotiating strategies?
dmc:on't remember that we were still pushing the bow wave after gorbachev's announced unilateral cuts.
1 thinkake it, my own personal view,anted to go into arms controlhought that the whole thing was coming apart,hought what we were going to do was to try anday that it could come apart without perhapsisaster.hink the bow wave, by then, was over. Gorbachev had shot it-
NS: (faint voice) . . hose who were negotiating around thes?
DMc: OK. You're going to have to ask. . . .
RL: I'm the old guy- ave not only all the different hats, but all the age to go with, that goes with it-We were mainly interested in outcomes rather than inputs,ense. So if the intelligence estimates overestimated in some area or another, we nevertheless were negotiating towards what we thought were equal outcomes, sometimes we had to be very cautious about that. But let meouple of points, in one of my hatsaveowot of time going around republics of the former Soviet Union,
including Russia, Lo wmd TaciliLies. as, ew weeks ago, at vektor. vektor was one of the big BW facilities. You know we didn'teally strong compliancehink, in the compliance report on BW until about. The Intelligence Community, as an intelligence judgment, said,ery long period of time, going back before Sverdlovsk, but clearly at least from that period in public, that their professional judgment was that the Soviet Unionarge BW, offensive BW program. OK. But it was hard to meet the sort of verification compliance standards, to take it, in essence,ourt. Atew weeks ago,atuilding that has probably more BL4 facilities In one floor than the whole United States ever had. Thisajor city,riefing from them on the history of this program, which beganfter the biological weapons convention went into effect. Itmall town or city that was devoted to the biological weapons program. Now there is some interesting news there, but it is one of these half empty, half full. iscovered that theyot of huge buildings that were incomplete. Thathey finally stopped building them. . That's fairly late in the process.
Thoant to make is this. Whether we got the GDP right, or the percentage of GDP right, and whether they really were trying to rein back or not, in some areas, the momentum was still there. And while they have all the inefficienciesocialist economy that you could see around Moscow, they had several things going for them. One was the abilityommand economy to take talent and resources and say "go do something". If that got priority, it got done. It may not. have been overall optimized, but certain important tilings got done. hink that this is more an apples and oranges analysis than percentage of GDP.
My name is Gene Poteat,ormer scientific intelligence officer in the CIA. we've heard much Lodayirst-class Soviet military power at the same timehird world economy. We are lookingew situation today that we still have an economy in collapse,nderstand they are nowew generation of very advanced strategic missiles, submarines, and aircraft. I'd like to direct my question to Jim Woolsey. First, and any others that
would like to say. If that Is the case, then how does that fit in with our present arms control treaties.
JW: Well they areurprising amount of resources given the incredibly decrepit nature of their economy, on strategic forces. The Soviets,till say that, the Russians have announced within the last couple ofew strategic doctrine. Somewhat analogous to that of the Eisenhower administrationay, in which they, we felt as if we couldn't defend conventionally in Europe so we would have massive retaliation. They have clearly cone upilitary doctrine now that points toward more reliance on their nuclear forces than was previously the case. They doew ICBM in production. They are working, to some extent, on the rest of their strategic systems,hink with far less effect. But the new ICBM is real, and they'veood deal of effort into it. There are some other things that are particularly strange. One of the strangest is Yamantau Mountain, and their commitment to deep underground facilities, which continues touge drain on what has to be very limited resources. hink that the only treaty that's rather clear cut that they're
violating right now is mine, is the CFE treaty- And that's because of their sending so many forces into Chechnya. Thatatterhink, substantial concern and ought toeasonable hook on which the United States Government could hang its concern about the brutality with which the Russians are behaving in Chechnya. Thereumber of other issues2 ABM Treaty and the like,hink with respect to actual treaty violations the only one that jumps out to me right now is CFEesult of the forces in Chechnya.
AK: (Arnie Kantor) I'd just add that what is some ways striking is that these various arms control treaties are still treated seriously by the Russians. That is, when they step up to lines, when they go across lines, they don't pretend as though nothing happened. So these treatieshink without exception, are creatures of the Cold War, still structure, defined behavior- And, indeed, it's not without irony that, in the back and forth between the US and the Russian sides now about missile defenses, they essentially are saying that if we play fast and loose, or indeed cross the line on the ABM treaty, they will have no choice but to
cross the line on this or thac START Treaty. So these Cold War relics aren't relics after all.
JS: I'm Jerrold Schecter, I've been writing about
intelligence in the cold war. I'd like to ask all the members of the panel to think about this question, which is, Mr. Kanter started out by saying that everybody might have their own discount rate on intelligence. Mr. Hadley noted that intelligence was good, but you couldn't really know anything on biological warfare unless you reallyefector. The question is, have we really moveduman intelligence gathering to the technical intelligence gathering as our primary credible source for making judgments about the other side's intentions or capabilities? In other words, has the role of human intelligence changedesult of our technical information gathering capabilities like satellites and listening posts?
JW: Let mery at that. hink that set of ideas has been around for some time. It kind of first prominently entered the public debate with Stan
Turner's tenure as DCI in the's, hink the far better, and more current view of this isombined-arms approach, ay, between human intelligence and technical intelligence is the wave of the future. Spies tipping off satellites and satellites tipping off spies. Cooperative efforts between CIA and NSA with respect to signals intelligence, and so on. It is also,hink, clearly the case with respect to some of the post Cold War threats, such as terrorism, that almost the onlyouldn't say exclusively, but almost the only way you are going to get much of substance about them is through penetrating the terrorist groups with human intelligence. It is also, human intelligence was extremely important in many aspects of the Cold war in this combined-arms sense. To give you one example. One of the reasons weery good job of watching the development of Soviet weapons systems was not only because we were watching their test ranges with technical collection systems and we were watching their facilities that would be producing prototypes and the like, but because, through the effortsery courageous Russian spy for the United States, we had stolen many aspects of their plans for the way and the schedule on which they conducted research and
development. So we could sit there in the Pentagon, and did for some years, saying things like, "Well, we don't really need to move forward into full-scale engineering development with the jammer this year, because they are only at stage two rather than stage three of the program, and we can save the money and delay that because wehreat but we don'talidated threat, we willook this summer and see if they move into another stage and then we'll move." We couldn't do that all the time, but we didair amount. You could really only dohink, even back then, because human intelligence and technical intelligence were working together andhink, against some of the types of threats we are going to have to deal with in the future. That is also going to be the case. on't see them as alternatives. ee them as complementary,
SH: One of theoerveational Security Advisory Panel with Dave Jeremiah, Shares, and some others for the DCI, hink the model you suggest is out of date. It may have been, and again I'm not of the Intelligence Community, that thes ands weeavy reliance on satellites and other kinds of devices, because they made sense given
what we were looking at in terms of the Soviet Union and the emphasis on strategic capabilities and conventional capabilities. hink the pendulum is moving back, and people see that, with the new kinds of threats, we need to have better human intelligence. hink we need to do more on scientific and technical intelligence,hink there is an appreciation for that, but there are problems getting, strengthening the capabilities in both of those areas that need to be addressed. hink DCI Tenet is trying to do that.
AK: ould just add as part of this combined-arms approach that Jim referred to, you should view arms control agreements. Let Doug speak to this in detail if he chooses to,hink you should view arms control agreements as, in part, functioning to leverage our intelligence capabilities by channeling behavior, by drawing lines that have to be crossed, by putting burdens on the other side to cheat in ways which may actually be easier to detect. So one of the functions of arms control is to contribute to our intelligence collection broadly defined.
DMc:as in my earlier professionecond lieutenant, we called it "canalizing the attack." You
knowean? so it was the Arms control Treaty set down some rules, and the best example I've always used is, remember we didn't catch Al Capone as he wasank, we caught him on his tax issue. The Arms Control Treaty setset of rules. We didn't catch the North Korean nuclear program outside the arms control treaty, we caught it inside the non proliferation treaty. So the answer to the other question is, is very, very simple. It depends on the target. Some things you want to see so you fly up and look at it. Sometimes if you can't fly over and look at them you've got to get inside of them. Most of them benefit from all three, but it just depends.
My name is Fritz Ermarth,etired CIA officer, now in private practice, so to speak, ant to make an observationould have thought, given the title of the panel would have been made by somebody on the panel, and second, because of the presence of Nina Stewart, whourn or two ago- And that is, arguably the most important contribution of American intelligence over the last forty years, forty five years, has been to make the arms race, and more generally the military-strategic competition with the
Soviet Union transparent. Especially after thes, to the point where any graduate student could spealc intelligently about the military capabilities of both sides. And the world came to take that for granted. Now one of the consequences of that was it permitted us to conduct arms control negotiations with confidence. But another, arguably more important, was that it permitted us to essentially solve the Pearl Harbor problem. The strategic warning of war, or even short-term operational and tactical warning of war. We could say with confidence, particularly afters and intos, when we learned not only what they had, but how they operated those forces, how they mobilized, what's the difference between just rattling their pots and pans and actually doing something threatening, [end of cape]
FE: [Continuing] _INW problem. That permitted us to say, on any given day, you know, "No, Mr. President, the Russians are not going to attack tomorrow, or next week, or next month." Thatery valuable position to be in, actually, because, imagine the contrary. Imagine we had to get throughs, ands, ands with the opacity that we suffered ins, let's say. We probably would
have spiraled by accident, miscalculation, interacting paranoiaonflict. At least we'd haveuch higher risk of it. Now we actually put that capability to kindretty severe test. And that'sentioned Nina Stewart. In the early eighties, during the so-called war scare period,, evil empire, SDI, KAL shootdown, INF talks broke off, things were pretty tense. Right in the middle of that, weuclear release exercise called ABLE ARCHER. All of this in the public domain, by the way,ot of the intelligence product. Things were pretty tense. And the Soviets were doing some odd things, you know, canceling trucks to the harvest, youattern of things like that. ad just come back as NIO for the USSR, against the USSR, at the time [laughter)
SH: We know that, Fritz. We know that. Your reputation precedes you.
FE: Right. One of theas asked to do was an
Estimate about this. as on the alarmist side going in, but, veryiscovered how much we had learned. You know, guys like Doug, and old Ben Rutherford, the late Ben Rutherford, particularly in
the theater forces area. How to tell the dirterence between what was real and what was phony, what was partial, and what was general. We really had them wired on the INW problem. And we could sayigh degree of confidence that, "They're mad as hell, Mr. President, at you, and your policies, and your rhetoric, but they're not cranking up to go to war, or acting out of genuine fear that you're going to attack them." Again,ention Nina Stewart because shetaffer on the PPIAB, andery comprehensive post-mortem, or review, of the Estimate that we did Lhat came to this reassuring conclusion, and judged that we were too reassuring. Wee neglected some generally alarming features at the scene, overestimated our confidence in our INW capability.
ose thisuestion to you guys. It's not the arms control agenda, but the warning of war agenda. Did you think about it? Did you share the confidence we had? Is that confidence^was that confidence properly placed? But, in general, let me repeat the first point. This was the most important achievement of American intelligence in the Cold war, to contribute so massively, and so successfully, and so consistently, to simply surviving it.
HG: Steve, why don't you take the lead on that
SH; Well, I'llor theas in9 to
hings were in decline and collapse,on't think people were worried about the kinds of traditional war scenarios we had been in the past. But where we did have some concern was, at the time of the attempted coup against Gorbachev, and thereuestion about who had the nuclear command and control during that period. And what form did it take? What was the box, or whatever it was, that would be in the possession of the head of the republic, of the country, with which they wouldecision on nuclear release? And exactly how did it work? What was the wiring diagram? hink, ery short period ofumber of people tried to get very smart, and one of the things that was useful is that there had been people in the Intelligence Community who had been worrying that problemong time when it wasn't on the front page of the President's Daily Brief. So you had some resources to call upon. And one of the things that's important is to have that kind of depth in the Intelligence Community, My own assessment at that time was, we were good, but not great, Thereot that
we did not know. and we got through it. in that period of time, and we probably knew enough to have some reassurance, but, if that coup had gone forward in different scenarios,hink very quickly we would have felt that our understanding on that was inadequate.
i want to add just one point to that. this is notad anything to do with, it wasent out to langley. but, in spite of the improvements, andhink is absolutely right, thisuge achievement in the intelligence community, judgment still enters the picture,ould say character enters the picture, because,ircumstance such as, say, august0 in the mid east, there are lots of people in the government who kind ofested interest in not wanting to believe that saddam is really going to move into kuwait. and one of the attributes that you need to look for in intelligence officers is oneentleman who is here, charlie allen, demonstrated at that time, which is character, which is sticking to your guns and calling it straight, even when lots and lots of people are saying, *you know, it's very inconvenient to say that. you can't really believe he's going to do that, can you?" so, willing to be the
skunk at the garden party Is still Important, however good the technology gets.
DMc: Just twothought Fritz or Steve was going to say this. So, suppose that, in Juneou had been told that we had good solid evidenceoup attempt is about to go down. Would you have then concluded the Soviet Union was going to break up and go away? Or would you have concluded therehance the old Soviet Union might come back because of the coup? The situation Fritz described goes along with my window of vulnerability time. as able to prove the GNP wasercentage point lower than we're seeing, would you have said, uess they're going to cut their military forces unilaterally?" Did any of the people who were giving us the different GNP rate come forward andaper which says they're going to unilaterally cut their nuclear.-their forces? So, I'm justant to reinforce what he said. The issue was the threat, and all these other points were on is how we take the threat down. That was the challenge,iewed thathallenge of the arms control process at the end of the decade.
HG: Both long-term and immediate.
jl: my name is jonathan lewis. o-authored richard bissell's memoirs- reflectionsold warrior, and, for the past several years, i've chaired an intelligence study group at business executives for national security. one of our concerns is that the great threat to our country,now many of you believe, is the proliferation and deployment of weapons of mass destruction against us. given the lessons that you've learned in your experiences during the cold war, how would you say the intelligence community should be staffed andstaffed anddeal with this threat? and, also given the importance of timeliness of intelligence, how should the relationship between intelligence producers and consumers be best managed to deal with this diffuse, and often surprising, threat? thank you.
hg: who would like to take the lead on this?
jw: i'll say one word about it. it's not just the
proliferation, it'6 who it proliferates to, and what they do with the proliferated wherewithal to produce weapons of masshink the key issue, again, is not mirror-imaging, not thinking they're
going to behave the way we do [tape malfunction] straight. ould say here something that I've said publiclyumber of occasions, so there's no reason not to repeat it, that in the Intelligence Communityery poor job with an intelligence Estimate with respect to ballistic missile threats to the United States. It answered, quite possibly accurately, the question that it asked itself, but the question it had asked itself was rather strange. It was( essentially, if other countries try to develop ICBMs with the same care, and test programs, and safety requirements that the United States exhibits, and they do so indigenously without foreign assistance, how long will it take such places, say. North Korea, and Iraq, and Iran, to be able to hit the lowertates? Well, the answer they came to us with was about 15 years, and that may have been an accurate answer to that question, but it wastupid question. We've had now, you know, four years of reaction againstumber of people criticized the Estimate. Congress insisted on the Rumsfeld Commission being started. The Rumsfeld Commission reported. The intelligence Community'second look. The new Estimates are really very good. hink quite well done, and the Community has gone throughhange, in the
way iL looks aL some oC chose issues. But, part of this has to dohink, showing the kind of leadership that George Tenet has shown in the last couple of years working this question, rather than the kind of leadership that was being shown innd I'll just leave it at that.
This could be the subjecthole separate conference under the heading, "How do you do Intelligence in the 2lot century?" Because the map is very different. Societies have opened up, information is widely available, there is the Internet. The kinds of data that we used in the Cold War period, the US Government had an exclusive on. Now Che kinds of data we need to doot of it is in the open forum. So, you've got toot of things, one, you've got to find how to utilize, and organize, the intelligence that is publicly availableay that brings it to bear on the policy process. lso think that you've got to get away from,hink the Intelligence Community is looking for traditional acquisition programs, because these capabilities that other countries and terrorist groups will have will come up quickly, and you need to start focusing on not what is just observed, but what is feasible. And if
you look at the latest review on ballistic missile threat, one of the nice things about it is it starts by talking about what is feasible in certain time periods, and then make judgments about probability. hink we have to take these different kinds of approaches, because this situation we face is very different,
HG: One last question.
PC: I'm Peter Clement- I'metired officer at CIA. I'murrent one- Since we got to the question of ballistic missile defense,eally am tempted, since this is an issue that we're wrestling with right now very much in my office, the broader question about national missile defense here in the United States, and its broader implications for arms control writ1 guess my broader question is, are we on the vergearadigm shift where we're going to have to start thinking potentiallyorld without arms control?
AK: No, there's no reason to believe that we are lookingorld without arms control. We almost certainly are lookingorld with different kinds of arms control, and we ought to think about what kind of arms
control we need and want, rather than just cookie-cutter, the way we did business in the past.
SH: hink it's going to be different. ould say in some instances, the traditional arms control process may be, at this point inarrier to arms reductions, rather than facilitating arms reduction. hink that, other people may disagree, but the loggerheads were out on at START II and START III is in some sense keeping US forces artificially high, and, in somehink, perhaps on the Russian side, as well. You know, 1 when we got ridot of the tactical theater nuclear weapons from the US inventory--we did it notormal negotiation with the Russians, buteries of unilateral statements, first by President Bush in Septembernd then by General Secretaryonth later. hink we need to think about those kinds of devices,hink the era of traditional big delegations of arms control may be over.
DMC; I'll try to blend these two things. ouple of years ago,as asked totudy of something called arms control intelligence. ound out that was a
sequitor- hinkistake to treat arms control as something separate from proliferation and, by thean't understand why we talk about nonproliferation when it's proliferation we're really concerned about, and military defense. Weecurity problem, we have military threats. Therehave all kinds of policies and devices to prevent certain weapons from being owned; to regulate, and create transparency where they are; and, if all else fails, to take them out. And the intelligence that's needed is less effective if it treats these things as separate pockets,hink. hink that, in the future, policy is going to make it even more obvious that they're not really separable.
I think one of the most important and positive uses of arms control is precisely the one Doug stated, which was to maketand-down in the Cold War. When we were dealingower with the combination of ideology that was dying, and weakness, and pride, that the Soviet Union had. hink many of the things we've been talking aboutseful function in that circumstance. hink with respect to2 ABM treaty, which is usually at the heart of these discussions, we areery different situation
now. elped negotiate, at the beginning, the arm treaty, and was General Counsel of the Senate Armed Services Committee in the Senate when it came before the Senate, And thereumber of people who supported it, who didn't like the mutual aspect, of mutual-assured destruction. They felt that we,elt this way myself, that we needed to pay in the coin of restrictions on American ballistic missile defenses, in order to be able to have an assured retaliatory capabilityar should grow out of somethingoviet conventional attack in Europe, and the Soviets should be feeling as if they were going to have to escalate. We didn't want to rely just on the submarines with a, at the time, with the capabilities they had in thes, if the Soviets had very large-scale defenses.
Well, that world is gone with the wind- The Soviets aren't sitting with fiveundred miles from the Rhine anymore, onventional war in Europe in which the Russians attack is just not going to happen. At least not Germany, and not the west. And, so,hink the strategic underpinnings, and we don't rely on fixed land-based ICBMs predominantly for our strategic forces anymore, so we're not really worried about
vulnerability and being attacked by large numbers of MIRVs and so forth. hink, the underlying strategic reality that led us to negotiate the ABM treaty is gone, gone with the wind. ery good case can be made, not that it needs to be withdrawn from, but that it is not in effect. It wasi-lateral treatyountry that no longer exists. And when youi-lateral treaty of that sort, the questionuccessor-state problem under international law. If both countries reaffirm it, Russia reaffirmed it, clearly, but the United States needs toelieve, in order for the treaty still to be in effect, because it's not one of those very limited types of treaties called dispositive treaties which are automatically in effect. The question is, have we reaffirmed? The Executive Branch has certainly reaffirmed,ould submit that it is not in effect unless the Senate approves that reaffirmation. hink you canery good case that the ABM treaty is not in effect now,hink the substantive strategic reality which required it to be negotiated and made it rational in thes, is also gone with the wind. hink this is an important and interesting debate,on't think the patina of respectability that accurately hangs around
much of the arms control ots,s, ands, necessarily ought to attach to this particular treaty. on't think we need to, want to let the Russians decide whether we can protect ourselves from North Korea.
I agree with what my colleagues have said,ertain addition. Obviously, you want to use the tools that are appropriate to the problem,ant to add, and you want to engage the parties that are appropriate to the problem. One of our problems is that we lock things in, they become rigid, and then they don't change with circumstances, and they become an obstacle. But another is that sometimes we engageorm of neokelloggbriandism where what we decide we're going to do is establish some kind of norm, but we don't engage the parties that we need to shape. One of the advantages of some of the arms control processes we used in the past, even as we modify them for the future is that you need to engage these people because you're trying to shape their behavior. hink we have to be very careful about that. The final point is that, on this question of proliferation of technologies of concern, clearly globalization and the types of technologies we have today mean that smaller and
smaller entitles can cause us more and more destruction. It's going to be very hard for any centralized entity to deal with that. BW haslassic example. Let me say we have had some areas where we've had some success. We may argue that they're fortuitous, but, by and large, they were the result of some knowledgeable personystem noticing something that wasn't quite right, and bringing it to somebody's attention. That'sery reliable toolarge set of events. But, in fact, it may be the best tool we've got, as we've got to integrate more with what's going on out in the real world,
HG; Well, we've come to the end of our time, and so, I
don't plan to summarize. We stillot more to talk about. ould like,ay, to justouple of points, to the young people in the audience. There are young officers, and young professionals who will pursue careers in public service. ame over to beaught Public Policy and Leadership and Ethics at the LBJ School over at the University of Texas. You've heard some words like character, public service, and trust, and personal relationships in our session this morning. eally
believe, not onlythe standpoint of effectiveness and enjoymentareer, those values are very, very important, particularly in the interagency, or inter-service arena. If we enter meetings with the idea that everybody there is an enemy to be defeated, because our point of view has got to carry, it's going to be, notery unenjoyable career,ery uneffective career, ineffective career, what we really need to do is struggle together, And this group represents that kind of environment where we were fortunate enough to have bosses who allowed us to have open and trusted relationships, not only with them, but also with each other. ope you'll have that experience during your career, and your opportunities will be as thrilling as ours have been. Thank you very much.
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