George Tenent, U.S. director of central intelligence, spoke before at the kick-off for a Princeton University conference on the CIA’s intelligence analysis of the Soviet Union.
By: Jeff Milgram
Even though the Cold War is over, America still needs spies and a strong intelligence capability, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet said Thursday night at Princeton University.
"A decade after the Soviet Union’s demise, we live in a world still in transition from something that was well understood the bipolarity of the Cold War to something that has yet to crystallize," Mr. Tenet said. "In such a world, our country needs a strong analytic intelligence capability more than ever to help the president separate fact from fiction, avoid danger, seize opportunities and steer a safe course to the future."
Mr. Tenet, America’s top spy, spoke at Princeton University’s Prospect House at the kickoff of a two-day conference, today and tomorrow, on the CIA’s intelligence analysis of the Soviet Union.
Mr. Tenet made it clear that CIA analysts, while not always right, provided the American government with some surprisingly accurate insights into the Soviet Union.
"From the mid-1960s on to the Soviet collapse, we knew roughly how many combat aircraft or warheads the Soviets had, and where," he said. "But why did they need that many or that kind? What did they plan to do with them? To this day, intelligence is always much better at counting heads than devining what is going on inside them."
He pointed to other intelligence successes:
*The CIA’s Office of Soviet Analysis concluded that the Soviets could not cheaply or easily counter President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative missile shield.
*As early as 1963, the CIA predicted the collapse of the Soviet economy.
*In 1980, CIA analysts predicted that the Soviet Union would one day become an oil importing country.
"U.S. intelligence capabilities clearly were not omniscient during the Cold War, and we are not all-seeing." Mr. Tenet said. "Our Soviet analysts were not prescient then and our Russia analysts are not all-knowing today. Our analysts continue to work in a climate that President Kennedy described in his day when he said that intelligence success are often unnoticed while our failures are paraded in public."
The conference will bring together foreign policymakers, intelligence officials and scholars who will examine 800 newly declassified documents relating to the CIA’s analysis during the Cold War years between 1947 and 1991.
Mr. Tenet pledged that more documents will be declassified.
The conference is expected to provide new insights about the quality of U.S. intelligence during those years and its impact on U.S. policymaking, said Frederick Hitz, a Princeton University lecturer in public affairs and a former inspector general of the CIA.
The conference, "CIA’s Analysis of the Soviet Union, 1947-1991," will focus on intelligence during the years leading to the breakup of the Soviet Union. Among those scheduled to participate are Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser; James Schlesinger, former secretary of defense, secretary of energy and CIA director; Jack Matlock, U.S. ambassador in Moscow during the fall of the Soviet Union; and Oleg Kalugin, a former Soviet intelligence officer who took part in major spy operations against the U.S., including those of the Walker spy ring, before becoming a critic of the KGB.
Scholars from Princeton and other research institutions also will participate in the conference, which is sponsored by Princeton’s Center of International Studies and the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence.
"I think the conference will provide some interesting new insights into what the intelligence community knew about what was going on in the Soviet Union in those final days," said Mr. Hitz, who served as inspector general of the CIA from 1990 to 1998. "I think it’s terribly important for the historical record to be as complete as it can be on matters of what we knew and when we knew it during the Cold War."
At the conference, seven panels will review and critique a sampling of more than 18,000 pages of documents related to the CIA’s analysis of Soviet internal and foreign policy, economic growth, political developments, scientific progress and military readiness.