Inside the Wilderness of Mirrors: Australia and the Threat From the Soviet Union in the Cold War and Russia Today by Paul Dibb

Author:Paul Dibb [Dibb, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522873962
Google: a8GrswEACAAJ
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2018-06-15T01:06:10.444000+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Predicting the Soviet collapse

I now turn to why the Western intelligence community did not foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union well in advance. It was plain to me that the USSR was in deep difficulty at least ten years before its demise. Anybody visiting the Soviet Union could see that the centrally planned economy was woefully inadequate: we all used to joke about the Russian saying at that time: ‘The USSR is Upper Volta [in Africa] with rockets.’ By the late 1970s, my discussions with the British Cabinet Assessment Staff—and particularly the former MI6 officer and Soviet expert Malcolm Mackintosh—convinced me that the Americans were barking up the wrong tree with their unremittingly pessimistic Soviet threat assessments. The key intelligence agencies in Washington—the Central Intelligence Agency, Defence Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency—were convinced that the Soviet Union was about to outstrip the United States in military power. The wish was the father of the thought here: the ‘evil empire’ was indeed a military superpower that on paper, at least, was more than a match for the United States. But the reason I thought of it as an ‘incomplete superpower’ was the woeful state of its economy, which looked to me more like that of a backward Third-World country than that of a superpower. Increasingly too it was obvious from my visits to Russia in 1982 and 1984 that the communist ideology was a parody to which only the elite party apparatchiki gave lip service.

Yet in the Washington intelligence community and US universities there were maybe 200 000 Americans studying nothing else but the USSR. So why did they miss what was so obvious?1 First, and particularly under President Reagan, there was enormous pressure to conform to the conventional wisdom about the Soviet military juggernaut and the nature of the Soviet threat.

Second, as I have already mentioned, American intelligence experts relied far too heavily on—admittedly impressive—technical satellite intelligence data (of which both Pine Gap and Nurrungar were outstanding examples). The United States had no human sources in the Kremlin, although—as we have seen in chapter 3—the CIA’s highly classified intelligence assessments often said ‘the view of the Soviet leadership is’ and ‘the Kremlin believes that’.

Third, both in the intelligence world and academia, there was more and more study about less and less—so, in the end, they could not see the wood for the trees. For example, during my first visit to CIA headquarters at Langley in 1974, I was briefed by the agency expert who studied nothing but Soviet SS-18 ICBMs. I also experienced this compartmentalised expertise in a different way at the Australian National University, where I was unable to discuss the Soviet military in any depth with the foremost expert on the Kremlin leadership and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, my mentor Professor Harry Rigby. Similarly, if I asked Geoffrey Jukes—Australia’s leading expert on the Soviet military—about the state of the Soviet economy he knew little about it, except for some aspects of defence spending.

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