COLLEGE STATION, Texas -- Declassified government documents show that analysts at the CIA were deeply pessimistic about the chances of success for President Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts to reform the Soviet Union's communist system even in the final days of the Cold War.
CIA experts in the late '80s and early '90s came to believe that Gorbachev was genuinely interested in reform, yet the agency remained concerned that instability could lead to a return to hard-line communist rule or anarchy.A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the CIA released 24 intelligence estimates Thursday that show how the agency sought, sometimes far too cautiously, to keep up with the incredible pace of events between 1988 and 1991. The declassified reports provide insight into an enduring debate over whether the CIA really "missed" the collapse of the Soviet Union, as critics charged.
The reports were declassified by the agency in conjunction with a conference being held here on the role that U.S. intelligence played in the final days of the Cold War.
Clearly, the rapid changes in eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union had caught the CIA off guard and forced the agency to focus much more on political developments within the Soviet Union than it had ever done before. In 1988, for example, the chief of Soviet analysis at the CIA told Congress that the agency had "never really looked at the Soviet Union as a political entity in which there were factors building which could lead to at least the initiation of political transformation that we seem to see."
In fact, late in 1988, the CIA suggested that Soviet weaknesses gave the West a wedge to achieve "marginal bargaining advantages" in arms control talks but not to expect true reform.
By April 1989, however, the CIA wrote an analysis that included an unusually large section devoted to dissenting views. Clearly, the CIA was divided over how significant Gorbachev's reforms were. Still the report concluded that the Soviet Union would remain an adversary.
The CIA's analysts worried that Gorbachev's hold on power was fragile and that Moscow still had an enormous military even though its economy was cratering.
In September 1989, for example, even as the CIA had become convinced that Gorbachev was sincere, it still told President Bush that Gorbachev's chances of remaining in power were "doubtful at best."
By November 1990, even after eastern Europe had gone through a peaceful liberation, a CIA report outlined "nightmare scenarios" that could lead to civil war or chaos in the Soviet Union. The paper stated that "the old communist order is in its death throes," and that the crisis of perestroika threatened to "tear the country apart."
That estimate seemed to overstate the extent to which a poor economy was leading to unrest and a breakdown of political authority, a new CIA history noted this week.
Then in July 1991, the agency reported that "the USSR is in the midst of a revolution that probably will sweep the Communist Party from power and reshape the country within the five-year time frame of this estimate." The CIA was far too cautious. The next month, the Soviet Union went out of business.