After Judy Shelton started writing four years ago that the Soviet economy was on the verge of collapse, she was approached by two CIA agents. "You're causing us problems," said the spooks.
What troubled the CIA was that Shelton's numbers and conclusions differed from the prevailing view at the spy agency."My motives were questioned," Shelton recalled. "Why would you publish that sort of thing? For the publicity? For the sensationalism? I was stunned by the question and said, well, I've been doing this as a post-doctoral project."
The encounter occurred at a conference at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. It was three years before the Soviet collapse. The agents complained that Shelton's findings were prompting Congress to question the CIA's analysis of the Soviet situation.
"We have to respond," they told her. "And in responding we have pressure to reveal our sources."
Shelton had no secret sources. Her articles were based on research for what turned out to be a best-selling book called, "The Coming Soviet Crash."
Events since suggest she was closer to the mark than the multibillion-dollar intelligence bureaucracy.
Were the CIA's data faulty and its analysis worse? Was the agency, with its huge secret budget, its spy satellites, its uncountable agents, caught by surprise when communism collapsed, dissolved as swiftly as the water-soaked wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz?
If so, is it equipped to do any better in the post-Soviet world?
An evaluation of the CIA's analysis of the Soviet economy over the past 20 years gave the agency pretty good marks, but included this comment: "The CIA was not significantly better or worse than academic specialists."
The questions about CIA performance are the backdrop for a desultory debate in Congress over whether the intelligence bureaucracy needs reorganizing to make it more efficient and accurate.
"In 25 years they told the president everything there was to know about the Soviet Union except that it was about to collapse," says Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan, D-N.Y., a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The senator quotes himself predicting as early as 1979 that the Soviet Union was headed for collapse.
"They will no longer be able to rule from the center," Moynihan said of the Soviets in a 1979 interview. "The defining event of the decade might well be the breakup of the Soviet empire," he said in a Senate speech a few months later.
Moynihan proposes - some say whimsically - that the CIA's functions be placed within the State Department.
Sen. David Boren, D-Okla., and Rep. David McCurdy, D-Okla., the current chairmen of the intelligence committees, have their own proposal for reorganization. They would create a National Intelligence Center with what McCurdy called a "czar with teeth."
One of the problems the CIA had with understanding the Soviet Union was that there really were two Soviet Unions - the military and the civilian.
"We said for years the economy couldn't make a decent pair of shoes," said former CIA Director William Colby. "But it makes very good missiles."
In the post Cold War world, Colby thinks the CIA could sharply curtail the most expensive part of intelligence gathering.
"You can turn off a great deal of that vacuum cleaner of electronic information, maybe fewer satellites, a little less frantic processing," he said. "Look at it periodically rather than every day, every minute, which we had to do."
A far different view comes from Colby's successor. Adm. Stansfield Turner, who headed the CIA under President Jimmy Carter, feels he didn't know enough about the Soviet Union.
"We should have been better than we were," he said. "We believe that people like Stalin still ruled the country and that public opinion would have no impact."
Carter admitted to being shocked by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Was it a failure of the CIA or did the White House not believe what it was being told?
"We did an excellent job for Carter telling him the Soviets were likely to invade Afghanistan," said Turner. But, added, "We were not emphatic in describing the Soviets as more aggressive than Carter thought."
Unlike Colby, Turner thinks the CIA should build up its satellite network so "the government can keep track of any major activity on the globe, day or night, rain or shine, because we can do that with satellites, with photos, with infra reds, all kinds of other sensors."
CIA Director Robert Gates contends he is not one of those who thinks the CIA knows all, sees all. During his confirmation hearings, Gates said as early as 1986 he questioned whether the CIA was being "creative enough" in its analysis of Soviet developments.
The new CIA director is a hero in Shelton's eyes.
"One person who had always been extremely supportive in total contrast to the agency was Bob Gates," she said. "He was certainly open in terms of wanting to receive information and different points of view."
One problem the CIA had in looking at the Soviet economy, said Shelton, was that its analysts "tended to overemphasize economics and de-emphasize finance." She said the agency needed people who "could look at an accounting statement."
Her own gloomy and accurate prediction was based on trying to answer a simple question: "Can they pay their bills?" She decided they couldn't.
"We're in for some big shocks," said Martha Brill Olcutt, a professor at Duke who is an authority on the nationality groups that made up the Soviet Union.
"Until somebody begins to ask publicly why we failed to understand what went on and what that says about how we asked questions, we're just going to continue to make these same mistakes," she said.